The Fall of Moscow Station

by Mark Henshaw

  The woman nodded. “Nothing exotic,” she advised. “I’ll raid your closet later. Do you have a laptop and a printer?” Ettleman nodded. “Unplug everything from the Internet and shut down any wireless connections you have running. You’re fluent in Russian? I need to type a letter and I’ll need you to translate it after I’m done. And a hot shower would be very kind.”

  “Oh, uh, sure,” Ettleman said. “The shower is at the end of the hall. I’ll get you a towel.”

  “That would be lovely, thank you.” Kyra smiled at him again. “And you don’t have to be nervous. You’re doing fine.” Then she turned away and headed for his shower.

  The man’s heart soared and sank at the same time. Maybe he’d applied for the wrong career after all, Ettleman thought. Delivering huge piles of money to strange and attractive women who showed up in his apartment, reading his mind through his body language and asking for his services and amenities? He could get used to that.

  CHAPTER TEN

  U.S. Embassy

  Moscow, Russia

  A craft, her father had once explained, is a marriage between science and art. You have to master the science before you can aspire to the art.

  Kyra was an analyst now, but she’d been a case officer once and had worked the street before. She understood both the science and the art of it. She’d been in war zones before, had been involved in some serious fights, violence and gunfire coming from plain enemies out to do her harm. Street work was different; it was subtlety and advance planning. There was a learning curve to it, but just knowing the science of a spy’s tradecraft would not be enough here. It was not a place for beginners and Kyra was wondering now whether she truly was ready to face the Kremlin machine. The Russians were efficient and unforgiving. They had practiced on these streets for a century now and Kyra was neither stupid nor arrogant enough to imagine that her experience and intelligence alone put her on equal ground with them anywhere on earth, much less here.

  This was their home. They knew it intimately and would defend it. She was the criminal, the invader, the thief come to rob and steal. She was the villain here.

  She did have one advantage. The Russian experience gained practicing counterintelligence on their own territory was predicated on the idea that both sides shared the same ideas about success and failure, the same definitions. Kyra hated that anyone ever called it a game, but the contest did have its own rules about how to win and lose. The Russians always assumed that the Americans would send their best people and use their best tradecraft, that they would never make an unforced error. The Americans usually assumed that the Russians had enough manpower and practice that they could be everywhere and see everything, omniscient enough that they could make an unforced error and still recover. They didn’t have to be perfect to win here.

  Kyra couldn’t win the old game, but she might be able to win her own game, where a different set of rules decreed that a lack of skill on the street was a tactic, not a weakness.

  Kyra’s advantage was that she was both a case officer and an analyst. Jon believed that she would be a better analyst than he one day, or so Marisa Mills had told her before she’d been killed the year before . . . someone with a foot in both worlds who could fuse the two. She brought practical experience into Jon’s theoretical world. Now, she thought, they might turn the world on its head by doing the reverse.

  Why do you always run straight in? Jon’s voice had asked her. She’d found the answer. She had always been thinking like a case officer, always moving, always trying to take the initiative by moving. Now it was time to think like an analyst.

  Jon had spent years teaching her where analysts’ mind-sets and biases had led them wrong, where their long experience with one subject had carried them to exactly the wrong analytical conclusion. The Russian mind was no different, she was certain. She could win if she could bring them to a place where their experience dictated exactly the wrong move.

  • • •

  Kyra had left Ettleman’s apartment and abandoned the Tiguan two hours and three miles ago. Most of the equipment it had carried was at the bottom of the Moskva River, including the satellite phone. She’d thought about leaving it all with the State officer, but she had decided against giving the man anything incriminating. The Russians would be in his apartment eventually and she didn’t want to cause him trouble. She didn’t need any of the equipment now. Either the operation would work or it would not. None of the gear she’d carried would make the difference, so she’d laid it to rest at the river’s bottom.

  She marched north up the Smolenskaya highway. The Moskva was to her left. Three years ago, she’d been walking by a river like this one in downtown Caracas, the Guaire, a concrete channel that became an artificial river that split the Venezuelan city in half during the rainy season. She’d been shot during that operation. Maines had brought her home. Now the world seemed to be working in reverse. She was out to bring him home, even if he didn’t want to come.

  The Moskva turned away from her to the northwest. She’d passed the British Embassy on her right a few minutes before and her own country’s diplomatic outpost was not far ahead. Kyra didn’t know how far out the FSB or the GRU surveillance cordon would reach from that point, but Lavrov would surely have had both embassies under watch. She’d started looking for surveillance a mile before approaching the British compound and had seen nothing, but that was meaningless. The Russians could throw a hundred men and women at her and she would never see the same face twice.

  Kyra had come wearing a light disguise, baggy clothes, glasses, a wig, and a hoodie. Some of it she’d scrounged from Ettleman, the rest from stores around his apartment. It wasn’t a very good disguise and therefore it was good enough.

  Lavrov would have found a picture of her, from the cameras in customs at the Domodedovo Airport or the embassy in Berlin. His people would have scanned it in, then created a hundred variations on her face, different hair colors and styles, with glasses and without, cheeks fatter or sunken in. He would have distributed them to whichever teams were watching these streets.

  They would see a young woman approach. They would sort through the pictures and find one that wasn’t far off her current appearance. Is it her? they would wonder. A small team would start to follow behind. She was walking toward the U.S. Embassy. Was that her destination? Would she turn off?

  Are you behind me? she asked the Russians. Did you pick me when I walked past the British Embassy? She was going to be very disappointed if they hadn’t, but they would start to follow her eventually.

  She stopped under the overpass where the Kutuzovsky Avenue crossed the Moskva and the Smolenskaya highway. She didn’t bother looking behind. If the Russians weren’t there, she would give them more opportunities to find her. If they were there, so much the better.

  Kyra made a show of fumbling with the satchel she was carrying over her right shoulder, then took her time pulling out the fur ushanka hat that she’d kept inside and put it on her head. It was an innocent act, one that thousands of people might do on a cool fall night like this one . . . or it might be an attempt to change appearance. Security officers were a paranoid lot and Kyra was giving them just enough to keep their attention.

  She turned east and walked alongside Kutuzovsky Avenue. Cars roared past on the roadway above. The U.S. Embassy was only a block north but she was going to take the long way around. She looked up at the sky. It was night and she wished she could see the stars. They were all washed out of the sky by the city lights and smog. She kept walking, one block east, the cool air brushing over her face.

  She slid the satchel off, then removed her coat and felt the cold air invade her shirt. The coat was reversible, gray on the inside, brown on the outside. She turned it inside out, then put it back on. She practiced the maneuver a thousand times and she had to work now to mess it up.

  Kyra reached the intersection and crossed north along the Novinsky road. She walked another block, not bothering to look behind for anyone followi
ng.

  One block and she turned west, doubling back the way she’d originally come. Come on, she thought. You have to have figured it out by now. You can’t be that dense.

  She was still free and approaching the corner. The embassy was a half block to the north. One more to be sure.

  There was a Dumpster jutting slightly out of an alley ahead to her right. Kyra gently idled toward it. Within arms’ reach, she reached up and pulled the ushanka hat and the dark wig off her head and dropped them in, a movement that took less than a second. She pulled the jacket’s hood over her hair, and turned right onto the Smolenskaya again.

  Kyra heard the van pull up behind her, the side doors opening before it came to a stop.

  There we go, she thought. Not looking back, she pushed off and ran.

  Four men dismounted on the move. A series of parked cars kept the van away from the sidewalk, giving her six feet to spare from the men spilling out of the vehicle. The first one tried to hurdle one of the cars, caught his foot on the bumper, and went down. Kyra angled away from the street as she picked up speed. The second man made it between the cars, but he overreached trying to lay hands on her and lost his balance stumbling forward and went down on the asphalt. The third man behind hurdled his teammate, but Kyra was accelerating now. She was pulling away. She heard the van speed up and the woman pushed herself, now sprinting as fast as she could go.

  The embassy gate was fifty yards ahead. A series of white concrete planter boxes, really barricades, formed a low wall to her left, the parked cars still blocking off the road to her right. She heard the footsteps behind her getting close. Even at her best speed, the men were going to run her down.

  A brick wall rose up on her left, the boundary of the embassy compound. She passed a security camera suspended over the sidewalk. Please tell me you saw this, she thought.

  The gate would be closed. Embassy security would open it only when approved vehicles approached. Beyond the gate was the small security building.

  The wall flew by on Kyra’s left, the bricks melting into a single red blur, and she moved her legs faster than she ever had before. Almost there.

  The brick wall fell away and she saw the gated entrance, then the embassy beyond, the American flag flying unfurled in the courtyard, brilliant colors in the high-powered spotlights. She heard the screeching tires of the van chasing behind her.

  A man leaned out of the security building door . . . embassy security. He reached for her, to pull her inside, where she would be safe. They’d seen her running on the camera and opened the door. Barron had told them that she would be coming—

  Kyra felt the hit between her shoulder blades, sending her sprawling forward. She got her hands up before hitting the ground, stopping the concrete from stripping the skin from her face, but she went down in a rolling heap. She struggled to pull herself to her feet, then lunged toward the American guard at the door—

  The Spetsnaz officer coming out of the van put his shoulder square into her diaphragm, a football tackle that caught Kyra under her center of gravity. She had no leverage against the man, and he was at least half again her weight. He slammed her onto the grass strip in front of the brick wall that extended out from the other side of the security annex.

  “American!” she yelled just before the man’s body put her into the ground, driving the wind from her, and she could yell no more.

  Hands grabbed both of her arms, lifting them up behind her back until she felt her shoulders begin to scream in pain. Russian shouts that she didn’t understand came from all sides and a camera flash began to blind her every few seconds. A knife came out and cut the shoulder strap from the satchel, and it was pulled from her body.

  Kyra closed her eyes and didn’t bother to fight as her wrists were zip-tied together behind her back.

  Her attackers kept her prone on the ground for almost a minute, long enough for the cold to seep up from the cement through her clothes. She heard the guard yelling in poor Russian at the men pinning her to the ground, but they held her head down. She couldn’t turn to see it. Finally, they lifted her by her armpits and dragged her stumbling to the van. The U.S. guard was a Marine, she thought, given the quality of the English profanities he was dishing out to the Russians. If the Russians understood any English at all, they would know that much.

  Other hands reached out of the darkness in the vehicle and took her, pulling her inside onto a seat. The last Russian turned away from the American guard, who continued to harangue him in vile terms, and crawled inside with his teammates. The side door slammed shut and the van moved away. Kyra stared out the window as she was shackled at the feet to the floor. Through the side window, she saw the United States flag waving in the light of the flood lamps and receding as the van picked up speed. Then a black hood came down over her head and the entire world disappeared.

  Domodedovo International Airport

  28 kilometers south of Moscow

  The Russian liaison was waiting at the customs exit for Cooke and Barron. He knew the woman on sight, doubtless from the photograph of her that the FSB kept in a dossier somewhere. “Director Cooke, men-ya za-voot Vitaly Leontyevich Churkin. Zdras-tvooy-tyeh. Dobro pozhalovat’ v Rossiyu,” the man said. My name is Vitaliy Churkin. Greetings and welcome to Russia.

  Cooke spoke no Russian, and so let the former chief of station Moscow handle the pleasantries. “It is our honor to meet you,” Barron said in the other man’s native language. “We are most grateful to Director Grigoriyev for his willingness to meet us on short notice.”

  “In light of recent events, he felt that a discussion with a counterpart of Miss Cooke’s stature would be most illuminating,” Churkin replied.

  “I assure you, it will be,” Barron advised. “However, we need to visit our embassy here before meeting with the director. Last-minute instructions from the president, that sort of thing.”

  “Of course,” Churkin agreed. “I believe your embassy has sent you a driver who is waiting for you. Of course, we will be happy to give you an escort to the embassy, and from there to Lubyanka.”

  “Many thanks,” Barron told him.

  “Everything okay?” Cooke asked, her voice quiet.

  “Just the usual pleasantries,” Barron replied, switching back to English. “Welcome, we’re going to follow you everywhere, don’t be stupid and try any operational acts, that sort of thing.”

  Cooke smiled. “Of course not.”

  Somewhere in Moscow, Russia

  The van drove for a half hour by Kyra’s estimation, one violent turn after another, and she assumed that the driver wasn’t obligated to obey traffic laws. The hands holding her arms never let her go and the men inside never said a word.

  The van finally stopped, Kyra heard the door open, and she felt movement around her. Someone unlocked the shackles binding her legs to the van and the hands on her arms pulled hard, dragging her out. She stumbled getting out, unable to judge the distance to the ground and falling to one knee. The unseen hands pulled her up and led her roughly along.

  She felt the warm air of a building on her face and the sound of men’s shoes changed from a rough scrape on concrete to the softer sounds of rubber rustling across carpet to an echo inside the closed walls of an elevator. The doors closed and the car took several seconds to think about whether to move or not before finally ascending. The ride was smooth, the passengers silent, and Kyra couldn’t tell how many floors they’d passed before the car stopped.

  Kyra was led out and guided down another hallway, then finally into a room where her captors seated her in a chair. The zip ties binding her wrists were cut, freeing her arms at last. She wasn’t foolish enough to try removing the black hood cutting off her sight. She sat still, hands in her lap, listening to the conversation around her and trying to pick out any words she recognized. That proved to be a feckless exercise.

  Another five minutes passed before the hood finally came off of Kyra’s head. The world appeared, blinding and bright, and Kyra squint
ed until her eyes could adjust. The room around her was nondescript, painted concrete walls, no other furniture than the chair on which she was sitting, nothing to give her any clue as to where she was.

  The contents of Kyra’s satchel were laid out on a table in front of her. Some functionary was using a Nikon camera to document the captured gear . . . a Moscow tour map, an envelope, a passport, a ziplock bag with a disguise kit sealed inside, a pair of English paperback novels, some power bars, and several stacks of euros, the paper bands removed.

  Kyra’s escorts took their places by the gray metal door. A photographer aimed the camera in her direction and began taking pictures.

  A Russian colonel stood behind the table separating them. “Good evening,” Sokolov said. “Your name, please?” The command being in English, Kyra had no doubts that it was intended for her. She said nothing. The Russian officer looked at her for several seconds, studying her, then leaned forward, putting his face only inches from hers. “Your name?”

  “I am a diplomat,” Kyra said, lying. “I’m not required to answer your question. There are rules governing the interrogation of diplomats and you know them. You will advise my embassy of my whereabouts immediately.”

  “A diplomat,” Sokolov said. Kyra furrowed her brow. There was no venom in the Russian’s voice, no sarcasm. “We know the kind of diplomacy that Americans practice with tools such as these. But I think you do not understand that diplomatic immunity does not apply right now.”

  U.S. Embassy

  Moscow, Russia

  The Russian escort cars peeled away, blocking off the street. The security gate slid open, the embassy car pulled through into the compound, and Cooke felt some of the tension in her shoulders ease. She was still a stranger in a hostile land, but there was a feeling here, a tangible spirit that hovered over this little spit of American-held territory that made it feel very much like home.

  Her traveling companion had a fool’s grin on his face. “Your old playground?” she teased him.