“I’m not going to see you again, am I?” Mark asked just as Gregori was about to leave.
“Let’s just say that if you do see me, it won’t be a happy reunion,” Gregori said, and then he left the room, leaving Mark alone.
Everything was silent. It was the first moment of peace Mark had experienced in what felt like days, maybe even weeks. He stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass doors that led to his patio, looking out onto the Moscow skyline. The city was vast and strange with its various buildings crowding the landscape all the way to the horizon. Mark became dizzy; the lights of the city blurred and twisted like he was looking at it through a kaleidoscope. Maybe it was the exhaustion, or maybe it was the realization of how far away he was from home, but Mark felt lower than he ever had in his life. He could just end the game right now, he thought, and he pulled on the sliding door’s handle so he could get a clear look at the long way down. Mark tugged harder and harder, but it was no use: The door was sealed shut. They had even taken away his power to end the charade on his own terms.
Feeling light-headed, Mark walked to the bar and poured a glass of water from a bottle but stopped before he brought it to his mouth. Paranoia made him question if the bottle was sealed before he’d opened it—maybe it was poisoned, maybe it was filled with mind-controlling drugs. Mark had no idea, and he couldn’t convince himself how pointless such a gesture would be. Why bring him all the way here, set him up in a posh apartment, then poison him? The logic, though, only applied to a world that made sense and, at the moment, Mark was living an existence that was primarily defined by how absurd it had become.
So, Mark paced. He fidgeted with the magazines on the coffee table—all in Russian—and searched the closets, his bedroom, and any other concealed space to ensure he was alone. When he was convinced no one was hiding, waiting to jump out and pull off the Kremlin’s master plan of killing him by heart attack, Mark flipped on the TV. Beamed from an overhead projector onto a seventy-some-inch screen was the press conference welcoming home his fellow spies. Mark had no idea what was being said about them. Judging by the footage of adoring crowds and the happy looks on Ania’s and Viktor’s faces, he assumed everyone was sticking to the state-sponsored script of the brave spies returning home after a job well done. And for all Mark knew, maybe they had done their job. He just didn’t give a shit.
Mark was ready to shut off the propaganda—he had his finger on the remote’s power button, a moment away from shutting out the world, when the news network cut to different footage, footage that made Mark’s heart descend into his guts:
Sarah.
The video recording was shaky, but clear enough for Mark to see his wife, his home, his life right there on the screen in front of him. He reached out, instinctually, wanting to touch it, to feel the fabric of his world and hold it close to him; but all his fingers met was the vinyl screen.
Sarah was pushing through a wall of reporters, trying to get away from their house. But to where? Mark wondered—and then he spotted him. Aaron, that little son of a bitch.
Mark knew jealousy was the least of his concerns, and he knew it was ludicrous to even question Sarah’s faithfulness. But still. Mark was exhausted, beaten down, and still confounded by what in the hell was going on. And he was furious about all of it. Aaron moving in on his wife—his wife and his child—was the spark that ignited his rage.
He stormed to the front door, throwing it open and leaving it open behind him.
“Fuck this,” Mark said as he stomped through the vestibule. “I’m out of here.”
Mark jammed the down button next to the elevator. He jammed it again. And again. But nothing happened. It didn’t light up, didn’t respond to his touch. Mark gave the door a swift kick, then ran to the emergency exit at the west end of the room; it was locked. He darted to the east exit. Same result. Feeling helpless and trapped, Mark kicked and punched the exit, hoping someone, anyone, would hear him and come to his aid.
“HELP!” he screamed. “I WANT OUT! HELP ME!”
Over and over again, he screamed, punching and kicking until his voice went hoarse and his muscles burned and begged for him to stop.
But Mark couldn’t give in. He refused.
He returned to his room, slamming the door shut this time. When it caught in the frame, Mark heard a clicking sound, barely perceptible over his labored breathing. He went back to the door and tried turning the knob, but it wouldn’t budge; he tugged on the door, pushing it back and forth, but it refused to give. Mark was locked inside.
“Fine, you want to play games? Let’s play.”
With the ferocity of a feral, starving beast released from its cage, Mark attacked the room. He tore fixtures off the wall, used the one knife he’d been provided with—a miniature paring knife—to slice through the couch cushions, emptying them of their contents, and flipped over whatever wasn’t nailed down. He continued his rampage, panting uncontrollably, until he found what he was looking for: hidden within an orb-shaped sconce in the kitchen was a tiny oblong object, no bigger than a lapel pin, with a small wire coming from its rear. A camera.
Mark examined it, and he wondered just how many of these devices were planted all over his prison. It was a comfortable prison, he acknowledged, but a prison nonetheless. Forced to guess, Mark would say he was being monitored and watched in more ways than he could possibly fathom. But that didn’t mean he’d stop trying to undermine every attempt that was being made to keep him under control.
He held the camera out, pointed it right at his face, and then smiled, taking a pleasure in his tiny victory.
“Fuck. You,” he said into the lens, then he dropped the camera to the ground and smashed it with the heel of his shoe.
As he stood among the ruins of his trashed living quarters, Mark decided, at last, that he’d had enough. He was locked inside, he didn’t want to see one more second of the real spies and their shit-eating grins, and he couldn’t even trust the food enough to eat it. Weary, starving, and feeling on the brink of losing his mind, Mark fell onto the bed, and he was asleep before a pair of guards entered his unit.
12
Something wasn’t right.
Agent Richard O’Neal was hesitant to remove the final pieces of casework that had been tacked to the corkboard that hung on the back wall of his office. The photos, the telephone transcripts, the intercepted email messages—all the evidence it had taken his team nearly a year to compile had been unpinned and dropped into a box in the time it took for O’Neal to finish his morning coffee. All he had to do was tear off the few remaining pictures, send the box downstairs to be catalogued and logged into storage, and the case would officially be closed. Maybe he could even take a few unofficial personal days; though he’d dozed on the flights to and from Vienna, O’Neal couldn’t even remember his last good night of sleep, and even the strongest coffee in the world couldn’t stop his brain from feeling like pancake batter. Maybe that was why he was having this moment of hesitation, these feelings of doubt: He was delirious from exhaustion. Considering this, O’Neal ran his hand over his face—pulling down the skin beneath his weary eyes—and sighed deeply. It was a plausible explanation, there was no doubt, but O’Neal didn’t buy it. He could fool his superiors and colleagues, he could even fool Mark Strain. The one person O’Neal couldn’t fool was himself.
O’Neal had been working counterespionage for decades, and he liked to think he was an expert. He didn’t allow himself much praise, but deep down he knew that he was good at only two things: making French toast for his daughters every other Saturday morning and chasing down spies. As O’Neal stared at the few remaining pictures on his board—all of Mark—he couldn’t help but recall all the times he found himself questioning how the hell an American-born D.C. lobbyist with a criminal record as clean as his own grandmother’s rap sheet fit into a Russian spy cell. Because in O’Neal’s opinion—which no one asked for, he understood—Mark’s role didn’t make a lick of sense.
Sure, the package was
tight. O’Neal and his team had caught Mark meeting with Ania, who was no doubt a Russian spy, and they’d captured enough information to know how diligently Mark fought for Verge—an international private security company that secured much of its startup capital from Sergei Vishny, a Russian billionaire. There was nothing wrong with being dedicated to your job, but Mark’s level of commitment was more than intense. It was suspicious.
Still, there were holes. O’Neal had put in a fact-finding request to see what could be learned from Mark’s semester studying in Russia. What he got back from Duke and the abroad sponsor program was threadbare, and that was putting it mildly. O’Neal could overlook an incomplete snapshot; after all, Mark traveled there in 2001, before every move a person made was tracked by the internet. What troubled O’Neal more was a transcript he’d found on his own—a transcript that had Mark completing courses at Duke at the very same time he was supposed to be in another country. The transcript mysteriously disappeared from Duke’s databases a day later.
There was also the matter of smaller details, and that’s where O’Neal was convinced a case was made. Every so often he’d be fed reports from other agencies, reports detailing Mark’s clandestine communications with his handler, of Mark receiving transmissions—presumably from the Kremlin—instructing him how to proceed with his work involving Verge. But O’Neal never witnessed these details firsthand. He saw Ania perform plenty of acts of espionage. Plenty. But Mark? Not a single thing.
O’Neal removed a picture from the board: Mark and his wife, Sarah, strolling through the National Mall on a sunny afternoon. O’Neal had taken this series of photos himself and remembered the day clearly. The Mall was a convenient place for intelligence agents to make contact, typically picking up, or making, a drop. The crowds allowed for furtive movements and quick passes of information from a handler’s hand to an agent’s. When O’Neal followed Mark there, he expected—hoped, even—to catch Mark in the act. To do something that unequivocally pegged him as a spy. But unless Mark was really good and O’Neal missed whatever he’d done, not a damn thing went down that day. The only thing O’Neal saw was a young husband and wife enjoying a beautiful afternoon, same as the hundreds of other people who were doing the exact same thing.
Shit, O’Neal thought as his face screwed into a grimace.
An interrogation would have been nice. Maybe even a trial—those usually helped separate fact from fiction. But who needs due process? O’Neal bitterly questioned. Orders from the commander-in-chief himself were clear: Round up the Russians, ship them the hell out, and get a few of our own agents back in return. A show of force was in order, a message telling the public that the United States wouldn’t abide Russian agents on its soil. That we were standing strong against any Russian saboteur who threatened to compromise the fabric of our society. In a sense, O’Neal understood that need; he didn’t like trashing a year’s worth of work in the process, nor was he enjoying the feeling growing in the pit of his stomach that something was amiss with Mark Strain. Combine O’Neal’s lack of surefire evidence with Mark’s bizarre—and, if he was being honest, convincing—behavior, and one might begin thinking that a mistake had been made.
O’Neal tossed the picture into the box and strode down the hall to his chief’s office. He wasn’t about to voice any of his concerns—if this operation ended up going pear-shaped, the last thing O’Neal wanted was to be on the hook for knowing something was wrong and not doing something about it, even if it was impossible for him to do so—but he did want to get a feel for where his boss stood on all this. Having read O’Neal’s case file, it was possible the chief had some questions. Or maybe, if O’Neal’s paranoia was founded, he was responsible for feeding false information. O’Neal had learned the hard way, when it came to intelligence agents, you never took anything for granted. Motives were amorphous, loyalty was nearly impossible, and duplicity was everywhere. That’s just how the game was played.
With a soft rap on Lewis’s door frame, O’Neal got the chief’s attention.
Lewis raised his head and fixed his gaze over the glasses that rested on the bridge of his nose to look at O’Neal. His eyes were bleary from the small type of the briefing he’d been reading, and while he may not have meant to, he released an agitated sigh at the sight of O’Neal.
“Got a second, Chief?”
“No,” Lewis said, dipping his head back to the briefing. “Go home.”
O’Neal and Lewis had been partners a lifetime ago. At least that’s how it felt. At the time, both O’Neal and Lewis were on track to move steadily up the chain; not a meteoric rise, but a steady, upward trajectory. But then came O’Neal’s divorce, and with it a year of his life spinning out of control. Feuding with Lindsay over money, over their relationship, and over the kids took a heavy toll on him, and by the time he got his head straightened out again, he looked around only to realize that his peers, like Lewis, had all taken the next step up without him. He was left behind, and there was no catching up.
“Come on, just give me a minute,” O’Neal said, entering Lewis’s office as he kept his tone casual. “I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the operation.”
“Thoughts?” Lewis said with a twitchy smile. “Thinking is beyond my pay grade. We were ordered to do something, and we did it successfully. Now, it’s on to the next thing.”
“I know, I know. It was just so … unusual. Being there on the runway, making a spy exchange with the Russians. Felt like one of the stories the old-timers used to tell us back when we were still rookies.”
Lewis’s shoulders sagged and a soft grumble sounded in his throat—the tell that he was thinking, despite his claims to the contrary.
“Listen, Rich,” Lewis began, “I know you spent a lot of time working these people. All the intel gathering, the surveillance … it’s a lot. And I know you hoped for better results for all that work. We all did. You know how it goes sometimes. It’s not ideal, but you just have to accept it for what it is and move on.”
O’Neal nodded his agreement. He had no other choice.
“Have you slept since Vienna?” Lewis asked.
“I closed my eyes during your presentation this morning.”
Time had inserted a wedge between O’Neal and Lewis, burying their partnership, and friendship, beneath a mound of sand. Every now and then, though, a reminder of what they once meant to each other crept over both their lives. Lewis smiled at O’Neal, right before telling him to get his ass home.
O’Neal knew his boss was right. He was exhausted. His body ached and he could hardly even think straight. Maybe a few hours of sleep would help him clear his thoughts and put aside whatever doubts he was having over Mark Strain.
“You’re the boss,” O’Neal said, and he left Lewis’s office, heading right for the front door.
* * *
The morning sunshine blinded O’Neal. When his eyesight adjusted, the first thing he spotted was a pair of black SUVs parked on both sides of his modest Audi, which looked like a tricycle in comparison. O’Neal knew whoever was in those vehicles were waiting for him, and he knew he couldn’t run. He didn’t have to. This sort of dramatic confrontation between intelligence agencies was almost protocol. Someone wanted to talk to him about the swap, and they weren’t waiting to take a meeting.
So, O’Neal would play along. Maybe he could sleep on the ride to wherever they were going to take him.
“You’re not going to chew up my entire day, are you?” O’Neal asked a man in a black suit who popped out of the driver’s-side door as he approached.
“Ask her,” the driver said, nodding to the back.
A young woman stepped out of the rear passenger side. She was on the phone and, as she exited, she held a finger up; apparently, she’d be ready to begin the abduction in a minute.
During that time, O’Neal studied the woman. She was very young, that stuck out most. And she dressed well—like a corporate executive or something. The way she spoke was unusual; she rattled off words fast
and with a sharp, commanding tone. It all meant one thing: This was no intelligence agent. Which made O’Neal wonder what the hell was going on.
“Richard O’Neal?” the woman asked as she lowered the phone from her ear.
O’Neal scoffed. “You tell me. You’re doing the abduction here; I’m not going to do your homework for you.”
The woman smiled. “I’d hardly call this an abduction, Agent O’Neal. The man I work for would like to talk to you. In fact, a few people are looking to share a few words, and I’m here to help everyone get what they want.”
“Is that so? And what do I want?” O’Neal said, strolling toward the woman.
“From what I can tell? To be able to do your job and be left alone.”
“Very observant, Miss…,” O’Neal probed.
“Lang. Kelly Lang. And thank you.”
“I’m sure you’ve already realized this, Miss Lang, but it’s pretty evident that what I want directly conflicts with what the people you work for want.”
“Call me Kelly,” she replied. “And you’re right, but we promise to make the meeting brief, and you may find the topic of discussion intriguing.”
O’Neal looked at his car and groaned; he was so close to getting home, but he knew whoever wanted to talk to him wouldn’t leave him be until they were satisfied. Better to get it out of the way now, O’Neal decided.
“Just let me sleep on the way so I can at least try to be coherent when we arrive. Okay?” he said, walking toward the back seat of Kelly’s car.
Kelly turned her attention to her phone, studying something, then turned back to O’Neal as he was getting in the car. “If you fall asleep immediately, you will be able to get exactly forty-two minutes of rest.”
“Terrific,” he said, and he took his seat.
By the time the SUV was turning into traffic out of the parking lot, O’Neal was fast asleep.
* * *
The Throwaway Page 10