The Fall of Moscow Station

by Mark Henshaw

  How do they maintain cover on this place? She knew better than to ask such questions aloud back at headquarters.

  She parked the Tiguan in the garage and closed that door by hand, hiding the vehicle, then pulled her luggage out of the passenger seat and entered the house by the mudroom door. The building was mostly hidden from the street by darkness, distance, and the bushes, but Barron had counseled her to stay indoors anyway.

  The door leading into the house from the mudroom was locked. It looked nondescript, but the locks were heavy and the door and frame both were reinforced with steel.

  There was a keypad by the door, twelve black squares with no labels. She pressed a button and the squares lit up, each with a number assigned in random order. No doubt the numbers would be in a different order the next time she came in. The system was designed to prevent anyone from deciphering the entry code by watching the user enter it from a distance and guessing the numbers by following the movement of the hand.

  Kyra entered the second code that Barron had given her and the door clicked open.

  The mudroom connected with the kitchen, long shadows stretching out on the hardwood floor as the sun moved down behind the bush line. Kyra stopped and listened, not moving for almost a full minute and hearing nothing. She found it strange, but she was grateful that the safe house would be empty. Otherwise, some caretaker would have asked her to nazovite sebya with some Russian pass phrase she would have mangled even if Barron had taught it to her hours before.

  The Caracas safe house had been a tiny, ugly little space, barely eight hundred square feet with old furnishings, rusting gas heaters, and mold growing in the corners. This house was enormous by comparison, five thousand square feet spread across three levels, the entire space clean, the furnishings modern. A library on the main floor was stocked with both Russian and English books, and the kitchen had better equipment than Kyra’s own home in Virginia. The refrigerator was empty, but the pantry and cabinets had enough canned goods to keep her fed for weeks.

  Dinner was instant polenta, which she found in the pantry and cooked on the stove. Kyra was no brilliant chef, but her mother had insisted that her daughter could not call herself a proper southern girl if she didn’t know how to make a bowl of grits. It was likely the only taste of home she would get here, but it did nothing to soothe her dark spirits. There was an unsettled feeling in the quiet darkness that the comfort food could not dispel and Kyra wondered whether the spirits of dead case officers or assets might not be keeping her company. There seemed to be voices in her head that were not her own.

  The light outside had only minutes left before dying and the house seemed to be closing in, getting smaller as the rooms she could see from the table grew darker. She had kept the lights to a minimum, lest the house attract attention, but now she found herself reconsidering the tactic. Kyra had been alone on missions before, never minded it, but none had ever felt like this. Jon had always been at the other end of a phone if she’d needed him. Not tonight.

  That’s not true, is it? she thought.

  Kyra pushed herself away from the table, leaving the dirty bowl and fork to dry, and wandered to the staircase. She walked through the empty hall and found what she was looking for behind the last door on the left, also reinforced. The encrypted phone was stored in a cabinet with a digital lock along with other tools of her trade.

  It was a satellite phone, like the one she’d used in Venezuela when that mission had gone sour, but a newer model. She assembled the antenna and worked out which window to point it where it could find a U.S. satellite hung in geostationary orbit. She worked out the interface and began to dial.

  The call connected, encrypted, and the phone on the other end rang four times. She knew that no one was going to pick it up. Finally, the Agency voicemail system took over.

  “This is Jon. Leave a message and I might get back to you, but probably not. I hate phones and the odds are good that you’re not important enough to make me want to use one. So either come see me in person or I’m going to assume whatever you want isn’t worth my time. If you were able to track down my number, you can find my vault too.”

  She’d pestered him into recording a message and that was the one he’d settled on, his own bit of revenge on her coercion.

  The answering service sounded the usual tone, and Kyra had to suppress a laugh, lest it be recorded for posterity. She wondered if the Agency or the National Archives kept the voicemails of officers killed in the line of duty.

  She called his phone again and listened to the man’s voice a second time, smiling as she heard the familiar exasperation in his voice. Kyra disconnected without saying anything, then called a third time, committing his voice to memory as best she could. Jon’s dismissive insult to humanity ended once again, the tone sounded, and Kyra cut the call and powered down the unit.

  The depression invaded her spirit again as soon as the LED display went black, leaving her sitting in the near darkness. Kyra knew how to fight that, a lesson she’d learned over the last few years.

  She opened herself up to anger, letting the hatred for the Russians inside steel her spine. Lavrov was the reason Jon wasn’t here, and only he knew whether her mentor was alive or dead and whether an EMP was bound for Syria. Therefore, Kyra needed to connect with someone inside Lavrov’s operation.

  The flash paper was inside the desk under the computer. Kyra retrieved the notepad, made her way back to the kitchen, and took her seat at the table again. It was two minutes’ work to re-create the list of asset names, contact methods, and locations that she’d memorized in Berlin.

  She stared down at the asset list. There were three names.

  Adolf Viktorovich Topilin

  Major Elizaveta Igoryevna Puchkov

  Colonel Semyon Petrovich Zhitomirsky

  Who do I contact first?

  Adolf Viktorovich Topilin, Foundation electrical engineer. Maybe one of the EMP designers? If so, he could confirm its existence . . . maybe even provide the specs. She was impressed that Barron and his people had been able to recruit a weapons engineer. After the Agency had lost Adolf Tolkachev a few decades before, the Russians had put the screws to every other engineer with access to sensitive designs. The FSB and GRU still knew how to instill fear in the masses when they needed to. Lavrov’s engineers inside the Foundation likely wanted to avoid the very appearance of talking to foreigners, lest the security services imagine they were taking a recruitment pitch.

  It was full dark outside now, the only light on in the house being the small lamp suspended above the kitchen table. The house creaked somewhere, but Kyra refused to let paranoia creep into her thoughts. If the Russians were going to come in, they would not be subtle about it. She cleared her mind, then stared at the list again, trying to order her thoughts.

  Major Elizaveta Igoryevna Puchkov, GRU liaison to the Foundation, logistics specialist. Logistics for what? Kyra wondered. Acquiring resources for the Foundation? Or helping the Foundation move its cargo around? Both? Barron had not told her. She considered calling him on the secure sat phone upstairs to ask, but decided against it. If Lavrov had moved an EMP to Berlin for a demonstration, Puchkov would be the best one in a position to know . . . and if Lavrov had flown Jon or Maines back from Berlin, she’d be the best chance to find that out too.

  Even if she did know, what could Kyra do about it? What good was information if she couldn’t act on it? She cursed herself for going down that path and set that pessimism aside. Worry about that when the time comes.

  Colonel Semyon Petrovich Zhitomirsky, GRU budget director. Always follow the money, Kyra thought. The money trail could tell an analyst more about what an organization was doing than anything else. Zhitomirsky might not have specifics about any one project, but knowing where the rubles were flowing could at least point Kyra in the right direction. The moneymen always knew where the bodies were buried, even if they didn’t know which exact bodies they were. Save him for last, she thought. The other two seemed more l
ikely to have specific information she could put to immediate use. She would have to search the computer upstairs, see if the encrypted hard drive contained any information that would help her decide.

  Which one to start? Kyra wondered.

  Utilisa Lermontov Road

  Peredelkino, Moscow Oblast, Russia

  Adolf Viktorovich Topilin had stolen his wife’s car for this trip. She would be furious when he returned, but her red Ford Mondeo was faster than his own humble Lada Priora. How he would explain to her that they were leaving the country, not to return, he didn’t know. She didn’t know about his treason and Topilin wasn’t sure that Nina would even come with him once he told her. In fact, he believed that she would call the FSB once he told her. He’d considered not telling her at all, just leaving her to the FSB when they came to the house. But he did still love her, even if her affections were far more tenuous than his. He had to give her the chance to come with him, if only to settle his own conscience.

  One problem at a time, he told himself. His need for more time outweighed the suffering she would lay on him, and he spurred the car along the forest road much faster than was safe. The trees had combined into a single brown wall that he hardly saw out of the corner of his eye. If a boar or deer crossed into the road, his brakes would not stop the car in time to save the car or the animal. He sped on anyway, but it seemed self-defeating. The faster he went, the more time was stretching out, like Einstein had predicted. The closer he came to the dacha, the farther away it seemed to be and the trip never ended.

  He pressed on. Topilin needed to burn the contents of the box and he couldn’t do it safely at home. The dacha was the only place for it.

  The news of the government’s decision to evict so many diplomats from the country by itself had been frightful. Such things were rare and usually reserved for spies caught in the very act of plying their trade. It was not possible the FSB had caught so many CIA officers at once. How, then, had they decided who to expel? Were they all spies? Was the Kremlin merely lashing out at random? It seemed unlikely. There had been no rumors among his GRU coworkers of any kind of confrontation with the Main Enemy, as they still called the U.S., that would lead to mass expulsion. A secret source, then? Some GRU asset who had fingered the CIA’s forces in the Rodina? And if such a source could access that kind of information, could he not also identify the moles working for the Agency?

  That concern had cost Topilin his night’s sleep, and his wife had questioned whether he was contracting the flu. He’d denied it, not wanting her to pressure him to stay home from work. Absence might create suspicion, would it not? So he’d risen at the usual hour, trying to hide his anxiety by speaking to his wife as little as possible. He’d shaved, showered, consumed a breakfast of sausage, black bread, and blacker tea. Then his telephone had sounded . . . not his cell phone, but the landline in his home.

  “Ya slushayu vas,” he’d answered.

  “You are Adolf Viktorovich Topilin?” the voice had asked him.

  “Da.”

  “They are coming for you,” the voice had said. “The GRU knows that you are a traitor. You will leave now if you value your life.” The call had ended there, with Topilin looking at the phone, terror in his soul like he’d never known in all his life. He’d gathered every bit of equipment the CIA had ever given him, thrown it into a box, and loaded it all into the trunk of his wife’s car while ignoring her fearful questions and protests.

  Topilin pressed the pedal harder and the Mondeo protested, but obeyed.

  The irony was that the Mondeo would have been beyond his means to buy had he not been a traitor to his country. His CIA handler had warned him against spending the money and making a show of affluence that he could not explain away, but Adolf Topilin’s wife was a relentless woman in her tastes. She had never been happy with the salary the GRU paid him, no matter how high he had climbed. The Russian military was not a generous employer except to its highest leaders and Topilin knew he would never reach those exalted heights. He lacked the personal connections to get such promotions and appointments. In the end, he knew that he would have to leave his job or find some other income to satisfy Nina, or she might leave him for some wealthier man.

  But he was an electrical engineer for the Foundation for Advanced Research, had been since its founding, and the Central Intelligence Agency had been happy to give him that outside income in exchange for information. Three years of deliveries to his handler combined with compound interest had given him a sizable escrow account. He’d started tapping into the money in the vain hope that some spending would pacify Nina, but she was insatiable. The more he spent, the more the money fed her tastes. Even buying the dacha here had only quieted her for a year before she had started to demand better furnishings and Western electronics for it. He hadn’t wanted to buy it. Topilin knew that he could never explain it away to his superiors. Peredelkino had been a colony for Russia’s cultural elites, the writers and poets in the years after the war with the Nazis. Boris Pasternak, one of the Rodina’s greatest poets and author of Doctor Zhivago had lived here. Now the writers had left for more affordable boroughs and Peredelkino had become a country retreat for the bankers and businessmen. But Nina had her heart, or her avarice, set on this neighborhood and the social status that it would confer.

  Another turn and Topilin finally slowed the car. The driveway was to the left and finally he saw the dacha. Two stories, a small, renovated barn with a short deck on the second level. He hated the building, and knew that Nina had no real love for it, only for what it represented. And Topilin had never been able to accept the truth that Nina would leave him when she met some other man better able to pay for the life she really wanted. He had learned in the last hour that loyalty bought was not loyalty at all.

  But all that was irrelevant at the moment. What mattered was that the dacha had a wood stove. He would burn everything, then retrieve from the charred metal any devices the fire couldn’t consume and throw them into the woods along the drive back at random intervals.

  Topilin stopped the Mondeo, killed the engine, and pressed the button to open the trunk. He dismounted and scrambled around to the back to fetch the box. He cursed when he saw the contents spilled out across the carpeting. He grabbed for the small digital camera and the notebook of dead-drop and signal site instructions and tossed them back into the box. It took him a few seconds of searching to find the Short-Range Agent Communications (SRAC) transmitter where it had slid behind the can of kerosene that he’d brought. The onetime pads, the shortwave radio, demodulator unit, the USB thumb drives . . . did he have everything? He swore at himself for not making a list before leaving, and then wondered how he could be so stupid as to think that such a list would have been a good idea. An inventory of equipment used for treason would have been a fine present for the security services—

  “I must confess, Adolf Viktorovich, that is a very fine car. However did you afford it?”

  Topilin spun around and saw the man standing behind him. He was middle-aged, clean-shaven, his hair still thick and brown, with a few gray hairs around the ears. His overcoat was unbuttoned, hanging open, and Topilin could see there was no paunch around his waist, but he did not seem overly athletic. His face showed no emotion other than weariness, from what exertion, Topilin had no idea. “Who are you?”

  “My name is unimportant,” Anton Sokolov said. “What matters here is that you are a traitor to the Rodina.”

  “I . . .” Topilin’s protest died in his mouth. His brain was churning, considering lies and excuses, and discarding them all. One sentence from this average-looking man had cut through every possible cover story Topilin could dredge up to explain away the CIA equipment in his trunk. “No, I . . . you see—”

  The man waved a hand. “There is no point in talking here. We know what you have done. You will come with us.”

  “ ‘With us’?” Topilin looked around, and finally saw the dozen other men scattered around the dacha. A pair of cars moved ou
t of a side road in the woods and came up the driveway, cutting the Mondeo off from the road. Half of the men, all fit soldiers, entered the dacha without asking his permission. He saw them through the front windows, watched them fan out inside the building. They would search every square inch, Topilin knew. There was nothing inside for them to find, but it hardly mattered. The worst evidence was in his car, hidden by nothing better than a blanket.

  The man approached him. “As I said, a very fine car. And a very fine dacha,” he said. “I took the liberty of granting myself a tour of the grounds as we waited. It is a pretty little estate. You really must explain to me how you afforded it on your salary. But there will be time for that. If you would come with me to the van?”

  “Where will you take me?”

  “To the Aquarium.”

  “GRU headquarters?” Topilin asked. His legs felt suddenly weak, as though the bones had disappeared, and panic surged in his chest.

  Sokolov nodded. “I will be your interrogator. I have some questions, and I would be most grateful to hear your answers.”

  “What . . . what questions?” Topilin stammered, afraid of the answer.

  “I simply want to know why you did what you have done,” Sokolov explained. “Only that.”

  Topilin stared at him, uncomprehending. “And you have no questions about—”

  “About how you did your business with the CIA?” Sokolov asked. “No. Do you think we would have caught you if we did not already know those details?”

  They know everything, Sokolov realized. It would not have mattered if he had managed to burn the equipment and supplies in his car. “And if I cooperate?” Perhaps there was some hope?