Red Widow

by Alma Katsu

  Vampiry. And she knew who was to blame.

  A single, childless woman who had come to Moscow to find work, Boykova was fiercely devoted to the brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews she had left behind in the country. All of them were struggling, she had told Richard in a confession that had made its way into a report. Every day, the average Russian got further and further behind in debt, squeezed on every front to pay more, money that found its way into the pocket of some Putin crony. While people like Boykova drank themselves to death to forget that there was no hope of escape, that they would always be a serf to a self-appointed tsar.

  She could not stand by and let him steal her country.

  “We were amazed to see what a lowly housekeeper had been able to do. She photographed hundreds of documents. She planted mics and cameras in the most off-limits areas in the palace. She was one of the most daring operatives we’d ever seen, with no regard for her personal safety. Richard”—Sheridan stumbles at the name, choking up—“admired her. He used to say Olga Boykova gave us more in her two years spying for CIA than more highly placed assets managed in their entire careers. Many assets string their handlers along with promises and excuses, you know, hand over dribs and drabs of near-useless information that could’ve easily been had through less dangerous means, and ask for a lot of money. Olga Boykova made them look like fools. Greedy, fearful fools.”

  He reaches into his breast pocket and hands Lyndsey a photo of Boykova, obviously taken by a member of a surveillance team during the vetting period. She is a little bird, just sturdy enough to move furniture and spend long days polishing woodwork. Her face is small and triangular with a tiny pursed mouth, serious eyes, and a sober expression. You can see her uniform under a winter coat, sturdy shoes with crepe soles, heavy tights like something a much older woman would wear. In many ways she is the opposite of Theresa, and it makes Lyndsey smile to think of Theresa’s suspicion: surely this wasn’t the sort of woman Richard would fall in love with.

  Lyndsey understands why the FSB covered up the whole thing. Normally, if they’d found a traitor and caught the Americans red-handed, they would crow from the rooftops, splash pictures all over the internet, and make the most of it. But they were afraid. Olga Boykova would become a cult hero, a Robin Hood to the Russian people. It would embolden copycats and there weren’t enough FSB officers in Russia to spy on all the disgruntled cooks and nannies in every oligarch’s or corrupt official’s household—if they were allowed to find out about her. So, the FSB swept the whole thing under the carpet. “They even refused to return Richard’s body, because it would be evidence,” Sheridan says. A gust of wind lifts strands of his hair over his head, revealing the shape of the skull beneath. “That’s how afraid they were.”

  Lyndsey thanks Edward Sheridan with a handshake and heads back to her car, her mind whirling with each step. Knowing what Theresa thinks—what she’s shared, anyway—Lyndsey has to believe these reports would give Theresa some comfort. She’d see the valuable information Boykova gave them, and while she might never agree with what Richard did, she might begrudge his sacrifice a little bit less.

  It might give her some peace.

  She thinks back to the crude network diagram and how Theresa’s name kept popping up. A mistake, surely. There has to be an explanation.

  The two thoughts rattle around in the back of her mind during the drive back.

  * * *

  —

  Lyndsey has just taken off her coat and settled back at her desk when there’s a knock at the door. Jan Westerling stands in the doorway, wobbling uncertainly on those four-inch heels. “I thought of something. Someone, actually.”

  Westerling sits in the chair opposite Lyndsey’s desk like a reluctant witness at a police station. The reports officer is visually nervous, her fingers intertwined to keep them occupied, thumbs wrestling. Whatever she’s got to say, she doesn’t want to say it, would prefer to keep it bottled up inside. But duty prevents her.

  Lyndsey listens patiently as the words come spilling out. How it didn’t seem strange to her at first when Theresa Warner came to talk to her. They work in the same office on the same team, after all, The Widow’s desk just fifty feet away. After the second visit, however, Westerling wondered why Theresa Warner was being friendly now when she’d been in the office for over a year and Theresa hadn’t shown any interest in her in all that time. She dismissed this as being paranoid. Westerling had gotten kudos for a recent project: sometimes that thawed out the old-timers. They would suddenly notice you, as though you hadn’t been toiling away in obscurity under their noses. She decided at the time to be happy about it, not bitter. She hadn’t thought to be suspicious.

  Until now.

  “Did she try to find out Lighthouse’s identity?” Lyndsey asks.

  Westerling narrows her eyes as she thinks. “I’d say yes, definitely, but in a roundabout way. Not asking directly, so my radar wouldn’t go up.”

  “When was this?”

  Squints, again. “About four months ago, maybe? No, four months for sure, because it happened right around the time of the annual conference with the Brits and she made a point of saying she’d recommend that I got to go this year.”

  “But you didn’t give her Lighthouse’s true name or where he worked?”

  Westerling pulls back as though hurt. “Of course not.”

  Then would Theresa—if she is the mole; Lyndsey chides herself for the mental slip—have found it? “Do you have this information written down anywhere . . . paper copies of reports?”

  Westerling knits her brow. “Of course. But I keep that stuff in my safe.”

  “Could you do me a favor? Could you get all those reports from your safe and bring them to me? But try not to touch them, and put them in a folder or envelope before you bring them to me.” It’s a long shot, but perhaps they can get fingerprints off them. She’s not even sure there’s someone at the Agency who can dust for prints, or if it’s possible to get fingerprints off paper, but it’s worth a try.

  Westerling gives her a perplexed look, but she nods, and leaves.

  Once Lyndsey is by herself, she rifles through a drawer until she finds what she’s looking for: the network diagram from the other day. Theresa’s name is all over it.

  But so is Evelyn Wang’s. The name Kincaid had mentioned.

  She spends another few minutes studying it more closely, then logs in to the forum, searching out Wang’s profile. She has a ridiculously high number of posts, far above average. Lyndsey starts reading through them, in reverse order, and finds it’s just as Evert Northrop said: Evelyn Wang is a friendly girl. She sprinkles pleasantries on every thread. Maybe she’s trying to make friends—or more accurately, keep from making enemies. Or maybe she’s trying to win Miss Congeniality. Could she be the mole? It doesn’t seem likely.

  Then there’s Theresa. Lyndsey remembers her first day back in the office, the coolness.

  Not Miss Congeniality. Unless it serves a purpose. Still—is that fair? Since then, Theresa has been good to her. The warmth feels genuine: stopping by to say hello every morning, dropping off homemade banana bread wrapped in foil (I made too much and thought you might like some . . . I don’t suppose you’re much of a baker).

  Banana bread? Don’t be a sap.

  Lyndsey lets out a long breath. Finally, the clues are starting to come together.

  The only problem is, she’s not sure she likes the direction they’re headed.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SIX MONTHS EARLIER

  After Jack Clemens’s confession, every minute of Theresa’s day, it seemed, was an exercise in anger management. Seemingly every minute at work, she had to keep from breaking out in a screaming rage. Snapping at the neighbors or her mother on the phone, keep from bursting into tears in front of her son. (Tears were saved for evening, after she’d gone to bed and had closed the door on the world.)


  She had to confirm what Jack had told her, to see with her own eyes how badly she’d been betrayed. Getting her hands on the report was out of the question, however. It would be highly compartmented. There wouldn’t be a copy in the office, not if even Eric wasn’t aware of its existence. The only place she could be sure of finding it would be a vault hidden away in the bowels of the building, a place where paper copies were kept of all sensitive reporting. Paper because many of these were historical records, written before the digital age. Paper, too, so they would survive an electromagnetic pulse or other type of twenty-first-century disaster.

  The vault was a lonely little outpost manned during the day by a retiree hired back specifically for this assignment. She’d gotten to know him shortly after Richard’s disastrous operation, hoping to bully her way into seeing all the privileged records. The old man had proven impervious to her charms as well as her threats. His name was Jimmy Purvis, a case officer retired over twenty years now and had undoubtedly been well past retirement age when he was finally forced out. Unmarried and childless, with nothing to fill his days, he’d dunned the Agency into giving him a position so he’d be able to continue walking through the security turnstiles in the morning and getting lunch from the cafeteria.

  When she came for him this time, however, he already knew her. And she knew him, had heard all his stories from the old days and knew that he liked the crumb cake they sold upstairs in the coffee shop. So, she brought a square with her, tidy in its cling wrap jacket, and watched him eat it with his cold coffee as she sat in the battered old chair next to his desk.

  “You’re the only one around here who’s nice to an old man,” Purvis said as he chased the remaining clumps of sugar with his plastic fork. “Everyone else is too important.” Behind them were rows and rows of shelves, on each shelf archival boxes filled with reports. A label on each box bore the dates and subjects and cover terms of the reports inside. She had a good idea where the records for Richard’s case were, knew the general ballpark.

  She smiled at him, but in the back of her mind, she was calculating. He had to be close to eighty. What could he possibly want, what could she offer him that would be worth fifteen minutes alone in the vault? Not her body: he barely looked at her. He might be insulted if she offered money. Or tried to trick him.

  She leaned forward, touched a hand to his arm. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Jimmy, I have a favor to ask of you—”

  He drew back—but barely. “Not this again. You know I can’t—”

  “This is different. I’m only interested in one report. Just one.” She slid a scrap of paper to him. On it was the date, cover terms—everything Jack Clemens could remember about the report. “I just want to see what it says. For my own peace of mind. Tell me what you want for it. Name your price.”

  She was thankful that he didn’t erupt in fury, didn’t try to throw her out. It meant he was considering it. His mouth twitched, eyes narrowed. Silently, he pushed back from the desk, picked up the scrap of paper and read it as he shuffled to the shelves. She listened to the sound of heavy boxes being pulled down, put back. Papers rustled.

  Finally, five minutes later he was back with a thin folder bearing a triple red stripe along its border. He held it up, showing it to her like a boy who’d captured the flag.

  “You still got Richard’s car?”

  The XKE. So beautiful, it was like the Mona Lisa on wheels. Purvis was a sports car nut and had long admired Richard’s vintage Jaguar, had pored over the photo she’d shown him once. But the car was worth a fortune. That was like an insurance policy for Brian. She couldn’t just give it to him, not in exchange for one single report.

  She felt blood drain from her face. “You want me to give you the car?”

  “What? No—I’m not greedy. Just a drive. Let me take it for a drive, someplace nice.”

  This seemed like a terrible idea. Jimmy Purvis was an old man, so old that he had shrunk too small for his clothes. He wore Coke-bottle glasses and his hands shook. Should he even be driving at all? Did he still have his license?

  Still, on the list of things he could’ve asked for, this was benign. What the hell—he was doing her a bigger favor than he could imagine, and . . . he was an old man. This might be his last thrill.

  She nodded. “Sure. I’ll give you the keys for the whole weekend. Do we have a deal?”

  He handed the report to her.

  * * *

  —

  For two days after reading it, Theresa was in a fog. She managed to get by on autopilot, making sack lunches for her son and seeing him off at the bus stop. At work, she sat at her desk seething with resentment, her brain on fire. She wasn’t herself and she knew it. She was giddy in the company of others, dangerously so, the truth pressing from inside, desperate to be free. It was all she could do not to run down the halls, telling the whole bloody story to anyone who’d listen. You have no idea what your precious Agency is capable of. Our lives mean nothing to them, we’re nothing but pawns, and not one of us is safe.

  As she sat at her desk, struggling with the urge to set the place on fire, to burn the whole house of cards to the ground, she began to grasp the terrible truth.

  It had all been there in the few lines of that cable from Moscow, just like Jack had said. One of their assets, a most reliable one, had heard the FSB had captured an American agent in a botched exfiltration. The asset didn’t know that captured man’s name, but who else could it be? Everyone else involved in the mission had already been named dead.

  Richard had been alive—and was still alive. She had to believe that.

  And they’d kept it from her this whole time. Brought her back in to work—of course! So they could keep an eye on her, make sure she didn’t get any funny ideas, would be able to control her if she did.

  Could they control her? They shouldn’t be too sure, she smirked.

  She wasn’t dumb. Quite to the contrary. And she was resourceful.

  If the seventh floor wasn’t going to help Richard, there was only one option open to her.

  Russia.

  Only the Russians could free her husband.

  This went against everything she knew. Russia was the enemy, the target: this had been ingrained in her in eleven years of service. To go to them, hat in hand, and propose to work together—the very idea was heresy. Disdain roiled inside her like poison.

  And yet, it was the only solution. Her last hope.

  If Theresa was to become a traitor, it wasn’t her fault. No, this was all on the Agency. They’d left her no choice. They’d lied to her face for two years, kept her cocooned in ignorance, and now held her down, sought to keep her helpless. Well, she was helpless no more. The Agency was responsible for the hatred now coursing through her veins. She would have her revenge. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  But how to approach them? This was the conundrum. She couldn’t stop thinking about it, turning it over and over in her mind as she went through the motions of a regular day. New employees were told during orientation about agents who’d turned traitor. Their cases were dissected in painful detail, the traitors’ mistakes paraded before their eyes. The upshot was that new hires were made to believe it was impossible to contact a foreign service. Usually, would-be traitors approached the enemy’s representatives closest to hand: foreign embassies. But Langley and the FBI had the embassies and consulates in D.C. covered, or so CIA officers were told. How they did this was never explained, but Theresa imagined they held stakeouts near the entrances. You could be fired for visiting a foreign embassy without express permission. Theresa was understandably nervous. She didn’t want to be found out, caught, and arrested, before she’d even begun.

  She read up on the ways that spies before her—Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, Ronald Pelton—had made contact. Disappointingly, most happened overseas, where security was weaker and it wasn’t possible fo
r U.S. authorities to watch their people all the time. Luckily for Theresa, it would be easy for her to find out about the Russians working at the embassy: it was there in the office files, the information needed to surveil the adversary. It was all at her fingertips: where Russian embassy employees lived, which schools their children went to, the bars and restaurants they liked to frequent. She was careful not to spend too much time at file cabinets to avoid drawing attention. Nonetheless, her heart raced and her palms sweated the whole time, as if she expected to be discovered. For a security officer to appear at her desk any minute with a curt, “Please come with me, ma’am.” But each time she thought about stepping away and forgetting the whole thing, she was haunted by the thought of Richard in a Russian jail, wasting away. Anything he had suffered was a thousand times worse than what she faced. And she would return to the files.

  Before long, her research led her time and again to the same man. Evgeni Constantinov seemed the best candidate; listed as a low-ranking officer in the embassy’s cultural section, there was no doubt he was really an SVR officer using the position as cover. He lived in a good-sized house in Great Falls—no low-ranking Russian diplomat could afford to live there—and the clincher was his proximity to McLean. Surveillance would be a breeze. Being closer to home, there’d be less traffic to deal with. Less time away from Brian.

  Having picked her target, she moved on to the next step: learning his route. It meant leaving her son with a sitter in the evenings but a necessary sacrifice, she told herself as she kissed his head and climbed into a rental car she’d left in a church parking lot near her house. After driving an elaborate surveillance detection route through northern Virginia, she headed to the Russian embassy on Wisconsin Avenue. The location had been quite a coup for the Russians, not far from the Naval Observatory where the vice president and his family lived, a lovely part of town. Every night, she parked or circled the block until she saw Constantinov’s car leave the compound, then followed at a discreet distance as he drove home. The more she saw of him, the more she was convinced Constantinov was not just an attaché in the foreign ministry. He was a little too alert and attentive behind the wheel of a splashy SUV. A little too fit, he looked like Russian military. She followed him every night for a week until she was satisfied with his consistency. He left the building at approximately the same time each night, took the same route. Apparently, he didn’t think he was being tailed by the Americans or didn’t care. There would be times when he would work late or be called away on duty, but for her purposes, she felt pretty sure that he would fit the bill.