Red Widow

by Alma Katsu

  The questioning will need to be indirect. CI was clear on that. Lyndsey can’t ask any leading questions, nothing that would reveal there’s a mole hunt going on. If Franklin is involved, it should come out under questioning, revealing threads that lead back to spying activity. Unless she is an expert and determined liar.

  She extends her hand. “Hello, I’m Lyndsey Duncan from Russia Division. I have a few questions for you.”

  Kate’s eyes lift briefly to meet Lyndsey’s, then dart away. “Is this really necessary? I’ve already talked to CI and Security several times—”

  Can this be over, please? I’d like to go home, crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head and never come out. Lyndsey understands only too well. “Absolutely necessary, yes. I’ll try to be as brief as possible. Why don’t you tell me when the, uh, problem started?”

  Franklin sighs, collapsing further into herself, like a falling soufflé. She knows she has to talk about this, but she’s ashamed. Revealing your weakness to strangers is part of the job, however. You lay yourself bare, over and over.

  When she speaks, her voice is small and helpless. “About a year ago. Right before I was posted to Moscow. I hadn’t gambled in a long time. At least five years, I think. Nothing, except the occasional lottery ticket. I started taking weekend trips to Charlestown, or Arundel Mills in Maryland. It was no big deal, just something to do with my girlfriends. A little excitement. But it was never a problem. Things might’ve been a little tight from time to time, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.”

  “What happened in Russia?”

  Russia. The bleak nights, the wet cold that suffuses everything. The loneliness that all single women suffer at an overseas post, probably worse for someone Franklin’s age. Franklin looks at her red, chapped hands as though they are responsible for her lapse. “I don’t know how it got out of control over there, I really don’t. I told myself I’d only do it once in a while, a treat when I’d had a rough day.”

  “You ended up placing bets with the locals? But gambling is illegal in Moscow.”

  Her first smile for Lyndsey is a half grimace. “It’s easy to find a bookie to take a bet on sports . . . a football match, boxing match. Everyone does it.”

  “How much did you lose?”

  She hesitates. “Twenty thousand. More than I ever thought . . . I don’t know how it got out of control—” She sniffles, reaches into a pocket for a wadded tissue, and dabs her nose. “The bookie, he knew I was an American, he figured I’d be good for it . . . But he let me know he expected to collect—or there would be consequences.”

  “Did he make an offer for you to work off your debt?”

  “Work for the Russians, you mean?” Her look is beyond contempt. “I would never do that. It was only twenty thousand. I don’t have that kind of money lying around, but I could get my hands on it. Take it out of my retirement fund. Borrow from relatives. I wouldn’t agree to spy—no way.” She stops to compose herself. “It didn’t come to that. He let me make one more bet—and that one came in.” Franklin pulls back slightly as though waiting to see how Lyndsey will react. Even she knows it was too good to be true. “Sure, I thought it was suspicious . . . But he said I won it. It would wipe out my debt. I wasn’t about to turn it down.”

  “But you didn’t tell the Station about it, any of it . . .”

  “I was hoping for a miracle. That it would all blow over and everything would be okay . . .” She starts shredding the tissue. “CI has made it clear they think I was being set up. That the Russians were going to start pressuring me after I’d accepted the money, when I didn’t have any choice because they’d have proof I was dirty.”

  “You understood the risk.”

  “But that’s not what happened, I swear.”

  Lyndsey says nothing, absorbing every flick of her eyes, twitch of her mouth, every nervous fidget of her hands. CI says they’d caught Franklin before the Russians had a chance: there’d been a little money left over after paying off her debt, a few thousand dollars, which she put in her bank account. It wasn’t necessarily sloppy tradecraft: such a small amount could be overlooked or explained away if anyone asked. It was just her bad luck that this happened as the mole hunt kicked off, and Security pressed harder than they normally would. She crumbled under questioning.

  “I admit I haven’t used the best judgment. Have I done things I wish I hadn’t? Sure, hasn’t everyone? I haven’t committed a crime.” The tears subside as anger rises to the surface. “I’m not stupid. I know what’s going on: something bad happened and they’re looking to pin it on someone. If they can’t find out who did it, they’re going to pin it on me.” Her eyes frantically search Lyndsey’s face for confirmation.

  “We want the guilty party. We’re not looking for a scapegoat.” Lyndsey tries to sound authoritative, but Franklin glares at her. She thinks I’m being naïve. “Look, your best bet is to cooperate fully with the investigation. If you’re innocent, you’ll be exonerated.”

  Franklin turns away from her in exasperation. She’s shaking visibly from head to toe. Her strange behavior worries Lyndsey: could it be a sign of guilt? Does the heightened emotion mean she’s lying? Lyndsey’s own recent scrape with Security doesn’t help. It’s hard to be objective.

  Then she remembers what Ruth Mallory told her. A past incident? Maybe there’s something in Franklin’s past that would be relevant. Reese Munroe, the Station Chief, might know.

  Lyndsey stands. “That’s all I have—for now. Thanks for your time.” She can’t quite read the expression on Franklin’s face, but it is worrying. Angry and sad and hopeless all in one. She gathers up shreds of tissue before leaving without another word.

  Raymond Murphy is waiting in the next room. He sits on the edge of the table, arms crossed over his chest, chewing his bottom lip, but stands when Lyndsey enters.

  His face shines with excitement, like a dog who has caught a hare. “So—what do you think?” He wants the human lie detector to congratulate him.

  “I couldn’t tell if she’s hiding something but . . . it felt like the truth.”

  He is crestfallen and stares at her with displeasure. “And you were able to come to this conclusion after just a couple minutes with her?”

  “I’m not done yet. Let me ask you—have there been other incidents in the past? Have you spoken to her former supervisors?” She doesn’t want to bother Reese if Murphy’s already spoken to him.

  The Counterintelligence officer squirms. “I’ve spoken to some of them—but I’m not done with my investigation, either.” Defensive. She’s caught him in a lie. “But I think you’re wrong. I say where there’s smoke, there’s fire. People aren’t just a little bad, Lyndsey. There’s something else going on here, I know it.” She catches the subtext here. He’s talking about her.

  It’s early days in the investigation and Raymond is undoubtedly under pressure by his management to find the guilty party fast, just as Eric is under pressure from the Director. She understands why he wants her to agree with him, but she feels in her bones that he’s wrong.

  Franklin is not the mole.

  Should she argue with him? It would be pointless, she decides. He needs to figure this out for himself. “Fine—you do that. In the meantime, I’ll continue with my end of the investigation.” It was inevitable that she would clash with Raymond but she doesn’t like the way things are going with him. She throws the door open and exits before she can say anything worse.

  FIFTEEN

  Lyndsey checks her watch once, twice, three times in five minutes. She hasn’t spoken to Reese Munroe, the Chief of Station when she was posted to Moscow, since she’d left a few years ago. Chiefs of Station were important, busy positions. Lyndsey regretted losing touch with her former boss but had expected no different. That was how it went with people shuttling off to positions in other parts of the world, Beirut for Lyndsey, Minsk for Munroe.
She’d emailed him a few days earlier, mentioning Kate Franklin’s name and asking if he could find the time to talk. An officer at Minsk Station got in touch right away to arrange a time, not a good sign.

  She sits at her desk, drumming her fingers as she waits for the call. Why has she let so much time pass since talking to Reese? Of all the bosses she’s had, he has been the best, even better than Eric. He believed in her when she was a rookie in his Station. A father figure to a girl who barely remembered having one.

  She needs someone to believe in her now.

  Lyndsey remembers the night that changed her life: Yaromir Popov had made contact and asked her to meet him in secret. She was a rookie then, knew just enough to know she might be misreading the encounter, that it might not be the godsend, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that case officers dreamed about. She was so excited that she couldn’t wait for morning, and she had called Reese, Moscow Chief of Station, right away.

  * * *

  —

  They met in a coffee shop that night, a block away from his home in the neighborhood of Barrikadnaya, not far from the U.S. embassy compound, Reese still in the suit he’d worn all day, stirring his coffee as Lyndsey told him what had happened at the party. “He wants to meet tomorrow.” Even though she’d only been working for Reese a few months, she felt they had a good relationship. He’d already given her more autonomy than the rest of his case officers—though that could all be over after tonight.

  The ring of the metal spoon as Reese tapped it against the thick mug. “It could be a trap.”

  But when she had looked Popov in the eye, she thought she had seen something there. She held on to that. “If the SVR only wanted to go on a fishing expedition, they would have sent a lower-level officer, someone more plausible.”

  The restaurant’s overhead light had cast Reese in a harsh shadow, deepening the lines on his face. He looked like a man who’d spent a lifetime in a prison cell. “He wants to meet in less than twenty-four hours. We won’t have time to take the proper precautions. That’s just what they’d do if they wanted to test us. See what our weaknesses are.”

  “Or he might be rushing so his people won’t have time to get him under surveillance.”

  They both had known at the time that the Agency was struggling in Moscow. Russian internal security seemingly had doubled down on them, and in two years, the Station had picked up no new assets. “When was the last time we had someone with this kind of inside access? Let’s hear him out, at least. What have we got to lose?”

  He’d given her a sober look. “They could arrest you. Throw you in jail.”

  It could happen. They were trained for it: a little rough treatment, a couple nights in jail. But the SVR tended to throw disgraced intelligence officers out of the country quickly, persona non grata, rather than hold on to them.

  The long-term implications were huge. If Lyndsey were caught, her career probably wouldn’t survive. It had just started to look up with the early posting to Moscow: most of her friends were slogging away at backwater posts in far-flung corners of the globe, hoping someone back at Langley read their reports. She could be throwing all that away. She had to pick her battles.

  Her gut told her that this was the battle to pick.

  “This whole thing doesn’t feel right,” Reese warned her at the time. “They would try something like this if they wanted to get rid of you, but you haven’t had time to piss them off. These things are usually tit-for-tat, but they have no reason to throw one of us out now. There hasn’t been a recent scandal. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Lyndsey had leaned across the battered tabletop, straining to get through to her boss. “Let me do it, Reese. I’m willing to take the risk. That’s why I’m here. If we don’t take chances, we might as well go home.” Then there was the part she couldn’t say aloud: Moscow Station is failing on your watch. Let me help.

  He’d stared back at her for so long, his expression unreadable, that she was sure she’d lost. But then he cracked the tiniest smile. “I knew Josh Kleinman, you know. I have great respect for his judgment. He gave me that paper you wrote, the one on microexpressions.”

  Lyndsey had tried not to look surprised, or too pleased. Kleinman had been her psych advisor in college. He’d been impressed with the work she did with a pair of computer vision specialists to come up with a program that picked out tiny changes in video subjects’ facial expressions. It enabled computers to tell when people were lying or even thinking about lying more accurately than with a polygraph. It had brought a flood of attention from police departments and casinos and—unexpectedly—the CIA, too. It wasn’t until later than she figured out her professor had encouraged Langley to get in touch with her about a job.

  But in Moscow, there would be no video camera taping Popov, no program scouring his image for near-invisible twitches and tells, no advisor whispering in her ear.

  Reese had sighed. “So far, from your time here, I haven’t seen you do one thing to refute Josh’s opinion of you, Lyndsey. Your instincts have been spot-on. If you think Popov is on the up-and-up, I’m on board. Okay, let’s do.”

  * * *

  —

  She still cannot imagine why she had been so lucky. What Popov had seen in her, why Reese had believed in her.

  The phone rings, jarring her out of her memories and bringing her back to the present day. “Lyndsey?” It’s the same friendly but firm voice she remembers.

  They exchange pleasantries and chat for a minute about Reese’s time in Minsk. The cold, the fog, the preponderance of grim Soviet-era architecture. He asks nothing about Beirut, which makes her think he’s heard about the trouble over Davis. She simmers with an embarrassment that can’t be discussed.

  There’s no need for preliminaries. She mentioned a task force in her email so Reese knows exactly why she’s called. “You want to know about Kate Franklin,” he says as they settle down to business.

  “I was told she worked for you at one time.”

  “Yes. A few years back, in Dushanbe.” Tajikistan, a tough post for anyone. “She had some trouble with gambling, as I recall.”

  So much for this being a recent problem.

  “She was counseled. Claimed she had it under control. But then something happened.” Reese’s voice gets quieter. “One of the case officers swore he saw her talking to Tajik liaison. Well, technically he didn’t see her with them, but caught her walking away from a couple guys he recognized as Tajik internal security.”

  “So, you couldn’t prove it?”

  “I interviewed her. She swore up and down there was no meeting and accused the case officer of having it in for her.”

  “Did he?” Competition can be fierce at stations.

  Reese grunts. “I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t feel I’d gotten to the truth of it and had her assignment curtailed. Frankly, I’m surprised she got posted to Moscow. She must’ve been able to convince Security that it was all a big misunderstanding.”

  The CI people will tell you it usually takes several attempts for a traitor to go through with the offer. That they’ll try one avenue, chicken out, try again. Dushanbe may have been Kate Franklin’s dry run.

  She may have finally succeeded in Moscow.

  “Thanks, Reese. And it’s good to hear your voice.”

  “Yours, too, Lyndsey.” It is warm again, and full of unspoken emotions. “Look—this career you’ve chosen, it’s not an easy one. That may be the understatement of the year.”

  He knows. This can only mean he knows about Davis, about Beirut. About her shame and failing. What must he think about her being the one to investigate a fellow officer? It’s the height of hypocrisy. She wishes she could disappear in a puff of smoke.

  “What you’re going through now, it’ll blow over. They’re making it a big deal. It isn’t. I know Davis Ranford”—he interrupts himself with a chuckle—�
�and while your taste in men may be questionable, I wouldn’t say he’s a security risk.”

  He knows Davis. After not being able to talk to anyone about him, even to acknowledge him, this is like a drink of water after a long spell in the desert. She longs to talk about Davis with Reese. A thousand questions leap to mind—How did you meet him? When? Where were you posted?—but this is not the time for chitchat.

  Reese continues with his fatherly advice. “If I were you, I’d be more concerned about who is pushing the matter with Security. You’ve made an enemy, Lyndsey. Someone with clout.”

  “I’ve been asking myself that same question.”

  “Security wouldn’t be dogging it otherwise: there’s no merit in the case. I know you, I know they’re barking up the wrong tree. Have faith in yourself. Hang in there.” Reese has more integrity than anyone she has met at the Agency. Her bottom lip wobbles a little; his faith in her means so much, especially at this moment.

  “Thank you, Reese. I’ll try.” A thought comes to her. Reese, like Ruth Mallory, has been with the Agency a long time. He’s probably worked with just about everyone who’s currently working on the Russian target.

  “One more thing, Reese . . . Have you ever worked with Tom Cassidy?”

  There’s a sharp intake of breath on the other end. “Why—is he a suspect, too?”

  Lyndsey doesn’t know if Reese has a relationship with Cassidy. They could be old friends. She could’ve just made a big mistake. “Masha said her husband didn’t trust Cassidy.”

  “You know as well as I that assets don’t always get along with their handlers. ‘Trust’ can mean a lot of things.”

  She weighs how much she should share. “Reese, I think Popov was on his way to Washington because he had something he wanted to tell me.”

  “Even if that was the case, you can’t be sure it had anything to do with Cassidy. Here’s my opinion. You may not want to hear it, but . . . Tom Cassidy doesn’t seem the type to sell out to the Russians. Not to me. The guy’s main problem is that he’s ambitious. Very ambitious. He wants to succeed, but inside the system. He doesn’t want to burn the whole thing down.”