by Mark Henshaw
“Yeah,” Menard agreed. “But it’ll take my people some time to get moving on this, maybe three days. If you can figure out a way to snuff this fuse by then, I’ll be a happy man. If not, you said it—we have our orders.”
“I’ll call you.”
U.S. Embassy
Berlin, Germany
“Nothing?” Kyra asked. She was sitting on the conference room table, hunched over, elbows resting on legs that were hanging over the side. Her stare was vacant and she’d hardly made eye contact with him for more than a day now. She was trying to keep it hidden, but Barron heard the anxiety in her voice. He was strangely relieved to hear it. It was the only emotion the woman had displayed since she’d returned alone from the Vogelsang base.
“The Germans swept Vogelsang over,” Barron told her. “The test site you reported was clean. They found a fair amount of blood where Jon went down, but nothing else.” It had been eighteen hours since the young woman had outrun the Spetsnaz.
“Did he bleed out?” she asked, her voice as empty as her eyes.
“They can’t tell,” Barron admitted. “The ground was still wet from the rain . . . they couldn’t tell how much blood might’ve soaked into the dirt.”
“No leads off that pistol?”
“I gave it to the Germans. The serial number was filed off and the ballistics on it didn’t match anything on file. I’m not surprised. Those Makarovs are the Russian version of the Saturday night special. They’re so common that just finding one doesn’t narrow down the field of suspects,” Barron reported. “And Lavrov is gone. The Bundeskriminalamt says he took off for Moscow this morning . . . took an embassy car to the airport and the plane had diplomatic protection too. Without any physical evidence tying him to a crime, the Germans didn’t feel they had enough evidence to even ask the Russian government to hold him in the country, much less withdraw his diplomatic immunity. Your testimony alone wasn’t enough to convince them.”
“Was Maines with him?”
“The Germans aren’t sure. Fifteen men traveled with Lavrov. He drove out to the airport in a caravan . . . one town car and two full-size vans. Maines could’ve been in one of them. The Russians do disguise work as well as we do,” Barron said. “But the Germans couldn’t even get a good look inside the hangar, much less the people or cargo he took with him. They don’t know who or what Lavrov loaded onto his plane before it took off.”
Kyra nodded. “What now?”
Barron sat down next to the younger woman, tempted to put his hand on her back. He refrained, not knowing how she would interpret the gesture. He couldn’t tell if she was hiding her emotions, or simply had no energy left to feel anything at all. “We go home.”
“What?”
Barron offered her a sheet of paper. “We got a cable from Langley. Maines gave up the name of everyone in Moscow Station, every single one. And the Russians figured out that I was Agency a long time ago, so I can’t get in there. POTUS has ordered the FBI and the DNI to hit the Russians back,” he said. “The Bureau has an open season on every Russian intel officer on U.S. soil, no bag limit. The DNI wants us to disrupt every Russian covert op we know of. Sounds like POTUS wants his own covert spy war.”
He expected an explosion from her, some loud expression of satisfaction. Kyra reacted not at all as she read the paper. “My name isn’t on here.”
“Makes sense,” Barron said with a shrug. “You were never assigned to Moscow Station. What’s it matter?” He was sure that he would find the answer disturbing, no matter what it was.
“I could go in. I’m not on Maines’s list.”
“Not a chance,” Barron observed. “Maines knows who you are, and I’m sure Lavrov has your picture from the surveillance cameras at the embassy.”
“I was in disguise. I can wear a different one going into Moscow.”
Barron shook his head. “Even if you could get in, what’s the point? In twenty-four hours, there won’t be anyone in Moscow who can help you,” he protested. “You couldn’t possibly save all of our assets over there by yourself. You’d be lucky if you could get to any one of them before the FSB or Lavrov’s people did. The Russians have thousands of counterintelligence and security officers. And you don’t know the exfiltration plans for any of our assets even if you could get to them.”
“We can’t just walk,” Kyra said, her voice quiet and flat. She lifted her head and looked at the clandestine service director.
“Three years in the Red Cell has messed with your head. You’d be lucky to stay out of Lubyanka or whatever other hole the Russians use these days,” Barron said after a moment’s thought. “I can’t begin to count all of the things that could go wrong. You have no plan, you would have no close support. The losses we’re going to take are bad enough. I’m not in the habit of giving the Russians freebies.”
“That’s exactly what we’d be giving them. We stand back and Lavrov just takes out all of those assets for free,” Kyra countered. “And then he’ll have a clear road for the next decade to keep giving away stealth technology and nuclear weapons designs and EMP bombs. Maybe the Brits or the Israelis will shut some of it down, but they don’t have the resources to go after the GRU everywhere on the planet.”
“Nice argument. That’s not why you want to go.”
“No, it’s not,” Kyra admitted after a long silence, her voice quiet.
“So why?”
The woman turned her head away from the senior officer. “Lavrov and those Spetsnaz soldiers are the only ones who know what happened to Jon.” Kyra stared down at the floor, then looked back up at Barron. “I know that the mission always comes first,” she admitted. “I know that you would never approve a mission like this just to find out whether Jon’s still alive. But he saved my life, last year, in Venezuela. I infiltrated that base where the Iranians were building their bomb. But their security came out, sweeping the buildings, and I was about to get overrun. Jon was up in the hills and he held off a whole regiment of soldiers with a sniper rifle, one of those big .50-caliber monsters that you use to destroy trucks and equipment.” Kyra’s gaze was distant, like the memory she was describing was playing out on the wall in front of her. She smiled for the first time in days, amused at something only she could see. “He refused to shoot anybody . . . made a good show of killing jeeps, though. Steam and oil spraying everywhere. But he wouldn’t kill anyone. He’d done that before, in Iraq during the war, and it still haunted him, so he refused to do it again. Probably saved the president from an international mess, too . . . but he could handle that rifle . . . ended up in a snipers’ gunfight a day later with an Iranian Special Forces soldier. Jon was amazing.”
The personal movie of her memory ended and Kyra’s focus returned to the room. She looked at Barron, focused on his face again. “I have to know what happened to him. If they did kill Jon and we don’t try something, they’ll never pay for it, and . . .” She stopped to force back a sob. It took her much longer than she’d expected, almost a minute. Barron refused to break the silence. “. . . and how am I supposed to live with that?”
“You’ll learn.”
“How can you know that?”
Barron smiled, rueful. “I was chief of Moscow Station years ago. You ever hear how my tour ended?” Kyra shook her head. “I was running a night op with one of my officers, Manuela Saconi. I was driving. We were going to use a jack-in-the-box so she could bail out to meet an asset. The FSB had a bug up its butt about something and we drew three cars that night. One of them was aggressive . . . got right up on our rear quarter. The driver had to swerve for I-don’t-know-what, turned right into us, and spun me out. Our car rolled, I don’t know, five or six times. Ellie died on the scene, massive head trauma, even with her seat belt and airbag. I ended up in a Russian hospital, concussion, major laceration on my scalp. They found the jack-in-the-box in the wreckage. Kathy Cooke’s predecessor worked out a deal with the FSB to keep it all quiet. The Agency recalled me and the Kremlin never declared me persona no
n grata and made sure the local news never covered the story. Ellie got shipped home and was buried before I ever left the hospital in Moscow. But I was furious. I wanted the Russians to apologize, to admit they’d screwed up. Took me a long time, but I realized that wasn’t going to happen. I came to see it was for the best . . . that took longer. It’s a funny game. The other side screws up and we help them save face, because if we don’t, they’ll do it anyway by coming after our people and making a big show when they catch one.”
“But if Jon’s alive—”
“If he’s alive, you’ll never get near him,” Barron told her, his voice soft. “You’ll never even get the Russians to admit they’ve got him. They’d be confessing to the illegal rendition and detention of a U.S. citizen, not that we have the moral high ground on that score anymore. They’d probably kill him and you both before they’d admit it if you did find out he was still alive. So you go in and you might die sooner than you think.”
Kyra turned her head away from him. “Even if I can’t find him, somebody needs to work the EMP problem. We need to find out where it is, where it’s going, how Lavrov is going to deliver it—”
“That’s not our problem—”
“Yes, it is. Jon was the one who figured out that Lavrov is selling strategic technologies. We’re the only ones who have the whole picture. Sure, the Israelis might catch the EMP coming into Syria, but Lavrov will still be running loose. He’ll keep selling the tech and there will always be a buyer out there—”
“And how do you think you’re going to stop the head of the GRU from running a global covert op?” Barron pronounced the letters of the acronym slow and precise. “That’s like one Russian case officer trying to take on the whole CIA.”
“Maybe, but when you think about it, we do that all the time. We’re all really on our own when we’re on the street anyway. We plan things out, talk through radios, sometimes tell each other to go this way or that, but when the plan comes apart, it’s one officer against a whole country, running for a safe house,” Kyra observed, not really talking to him. “I’ve always made it to the safe house. I can do it again.”
Barron frowned. “You want to be station chief Moscow that bad?”
“You can keep the title. I just want to get reimbursed for my travel expenses.”
Barron smiled. It was a small joke, but he would take whatever emotion he could get from her. “You’re insane. You really are.”
“No, I’m just motivated. But you can demote me when I get home if it makes you feel better.”
“Oh, you’re not the one who’ll have to worry about getting demoted,” he said. “If you make it out, we’ll both be heroes. If you don’t, the president will execute me in the Langley courtyard for letting you go.”
That earned him a small laugh from the woman. “So . . . dead or heroes. Isn’t that what we really signed up for when we took this job anyway?”
• • •
“Here’s the safe house,” Barron said, his finger pointing to a street on the Moscow map. “We just set this one up a few months ago, so if there’s one that Maines doesn’t have on some list, it’s that one. Case the place before you go in. Don’t assume it’s clean. If it is, chances are good you’ll have the place as long as you want it, but sanitize the place first so the locals won’t find anything sensitive in case they do show up on short notice.”
“And if it’s not clean?” Kyra asked.
“Then you turn around and you come home. I want you to play this one by the rules all the way. But if it comes apart, whatever you do, don’t run for the embassy. The FSB has the place under surveillance at all times. You’ll never get to the front gate if they’re looking for you.”
Kyra stared at the map, repeating the address that Barron had scribbled on it until she’d etched the Russian words in her mind. “Any ideas about which assets I should try to contact when I get in-country?”
Barron held out his hand, a folded note between his fingers. Kyra took it, unfolded it. The list was short, scribbled out by hand in cryptic notes on a sheet of flash paper, nitrocellulose that she could immolate in a fraction of a second with the Zippo lighter that Barron had set on the table. “That’s it?”
“That’s all the ones that I’m going to give you,” Barron replied. “They’re the only ones inside the GRU who I think would be in a position to know about any sales of strategic technologies that Lavrov is brokering.” There were only three names, but it was, at that moment, possibly the most sensitive document the CIA had in its possession. Even with Maines in their hands, the Russian government still would have murdered anyone in its path to retrieve it without a moment’s thought. “If we’re lucky, he might have forgotten or withheld some names, and I’m not about to help him fill in any of the blanks. But if he copied everything onto a thumb drive instead of relying on his memory, chances are pretty good that you’ll never get near any of them before Lavrov takes them out. So don’t try to contact any of them unless you’re ready to bet your life that Lavrov’s people aren’t watching. You take no chances at all, you got me?”
“I should have a few more possibles, in case I can’t reach these,” Kyra protested. “The Russians can’t watch everyone.”
“Moscow Rules—you assume that they can. You won’t have the time or the resources to focus on anyone else anyway. I don’t know how many names Maines might be giving up, but we have to assume he’s going to give up all of them. There’s no way to even know in what order he might go after them, so we have to assume he’ll want to take them all down as fast as he can. The real question is whether the FSB will play ball. If they do, you’ll never get to any of them. If they don’t, you might have a short window.”
“Why wouldn’t the FSB cooperate?” Kyra asked. “They handle counterintelligence in Russia.”
Barron nodded. “They do, but the FSB director is Anatoly Grigoriyev, and he and Lavrov hate each other. Grigoriyev was KGB back in the eighties, Lavrov was Soviet army intelligence and they were both stationed in Berlin when the Wall fell. They stepped on each other’s toes plenty in the aftermath. It’s an old professional rivalry turned personal. There’s nothing either man would love more than to get the other kicked out of the Kremlin.”
Kyra grunted quietly. “That might explain why Lavrov lured Strelnikov to Berlin. He was Lavrov’s boy, so it would make sense that Lavrov wouldn’t want Grigoriyev to find out about that particular breach until he’d solved the problem.”
“Agreed,” Barron replied. “That sounds to me like Lavrov doesn’t want the FSB to know what he’s doing. A major GRU operation to take down Maines’s entire list of our assets in short order would be impossible to keep quiet. The FSB would hear about it and someone would start asking questions. That’s probably your only prayer of getting to any of these people. Lavrov might be taking his time, working down the list nice and slow so he doesn’t aggravate Grigoriyev more than necessary. But if Lavrov is looking to plug his own leaks first, these people could be at the top of the list.”
Kyra tried to find some weakness in his logic and failed. “Yeah,” she agreed. “And if Lavrov hates Grigoriyev that much, he could get a lot of leverage over Grigoriyev by releasing the rest of Maines’s list to the Kremlin once his own holes are plugged. Watching the GRU identify moles in the FSB would probably finish him.”
“True,” Barron agreed. “And since Lavrov would be the one who cleaned house, he would probably get veto power over the next pick for FSB director after Grigoriyev takes up residence in the gulag. And then there would be no reason not to wrap up everyone on the bottom of the list at once. So all of these people might be dead anyway a lot sooner than we thought.” There was bitterness in his voice.
These were his people, Kyra realized. We’re going to lose all of these people on his watch. She wondered how many of the Russian assets had been recruited when Barron had been the Moscow station chief.
The room fell silent. Kyra picked up the list, read it through three times, then
opened the Zippo and spun the flint, igniting the tiny fire. She touched it to the flash paper and it vaporized before she could even open her fingers.
“It’s oh-five-hundred. You should get moving,” Barron advised.
“Just give me a minute, okay?”
“Don’t be long.”
Barron marched out of the room. Kyra leaned forward, resting her folded arms on the table, and she laid her head on them, suddenly more tired than she could ever remember being. You should have stayed with me, Jon, stayed behind the wall, she thought. I need your help, old man. A flood of anxiety rushed into her chest. She fought it down, but the horrifying thought that maybe, just maybe, she was wrong about everything refused to leave her.
Kyra evicted the thoughts, ignored the angry doubts in her chest, and held herself together long enough to fetch her bag from the hotel. Ten minutes after, she was sitting next to Barron in a SUV, pulling out onto the road for the airport. Kyra watched the Berlin embassy recede and wondered again whether she shouldn’t give up the fight.
Meeting Room of the Security Council of the Russian Federation
The Kremlin Senate Building
Moscow, Russia
There were seats for more than twenty-five around the long table, but the real governing quorum numbered far fewer and most of them were not present today.
Anatoly Maksimovich Grigoriyev had never pined for the old Soviet Union, but the room had always struck the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) as too ostentatious, a showpiece that sent the wrong message to the Russian people when the cameras were on. National security was not a subject to be discussed in a place like this. Too soft, he thought, too indulgent. The people should have seen them meet in a war room, a Spartan place with few comforts that would portray an image of sacrifice and resolve. The floor was dark wood with a geometric parquet pattern running through it. Square columns of dark marble topped with gold capitals stood out against the brown and cream colors that dominated the rest of the room. The front of the room displayed the Russian coat of arms, the two-headed dragon, gold with a red shield mounted high on the wall and flanked on each side by the country’s flags. The crowning irony of the place was an ornate chandelier above the table that could have been at home in a czar’s palace.