Red Widow

by Alma Katsu

  She goes through the work she’s done, every step of it. She tells him about the poison analysis, the conversations with Westerling. She lays out the conflicting information, too, and that CI seems ready to pin it on Kate Franklin.

  “That was really unfortunate, about Kate . . .” Eric says. “But you’re sure that you don’t agree with CI? You’re not just saying that out of pity?”

  “If I thought she was the responsible party, I wouldn’t hesitate to say so. But . . . CI is being overaggressive. I don’t think Kate was the mole.”

  Eric sighs with relief. “I’m glad to hear you say that. I didn’t think so, either. Not that I had any insight into this particular case; I’m saying that from what I know about Kate. But you wouldn’t be so sure about Kate if you didn’t have clues leading in another direction—am I right?”

  When she comes to the part about examining the metadata, she hesitates. “I’m not finished with that. Depending on what I find . . . that could change everything. It could point to someone else. It could exonerate her.”

  “Or it could be the nail in the coffin,” he says flatly.

  This is what she has been afraid of, Eric jumping to conclusions. “But it makes no sense. The Russians killed her husband. Why would she help them?”

  She’s been counting on this being the moment when Eric agrees and says there’s got to be some clue they haven’t picked up on yet, a clue that will reveal the real traitor. Stop me from turning in my friend. But that’s not what Eric is about to say, not judging by the grim set of his face.

  “Losing Richard was hard on Theresa—who am I kidding? It was hard on everyone who was Richard’s friend, but none of us can really know what that was like for her. It could be . . . that she’s twisted the story around in her head, and instead of being mad at Richard for taking such an insane risk—because that’s what it was, practically suicidal—she blames the Agency. After it happened, she waged an incredible crusade, trying to get the Director to look into it, when it was an open-and-shut case. What did she expect to find?”

  Lyndsey opens her mouth but doesn’t know what to say.

  “She might think it’s my fault, too. I wouldn’t blame her. Maybe I should’ve stopped him. I could’ve put an end to it. But the asset was his big coup, you know. His claim to fame. If he could exfiltrate her from under the FSB’s nose, well, it would be the stuff of legends. He wanted to try it and I didn’t feel I could take that away from him. I didn’t expect it to go so wrong—none of us did, obviously.”

  His regret is palpable. It’s as though the ghosts from two years ago fill the room, all the anger and drama and regrets. “It’s done. You learn from it—but you have to let it go.” It’s all she can think to say.

  “As crazy as it sounds, if Theresa has gone to the Russians as a way to get back at us . . . I hate to say it, but I can see it. She’s lost everything, and she wants us to suffer, too.”

  Can Lyndsey see that, too? She thinks of the conversations over coffee in the cafeteria. The bitter asides. The warning from Maggie. Yes, she can see it. It’s a possibility.

  “If this is true . . . If this is the case, Lyndsey, we have to bring her down. She can’t get away with it.”

  “Of course.” It goes without saying. She never thought that in her career she’d find a traitor in their midst, but now that she has she knows what her duty is.

  Eric leans toward her. “Don’t tell anyone else about this. Confirm your suspicions, then come to me first. We’ll figure out the next steps—together.”

  He stands and paces away from his desk, strangely energized, like a fuse has been lit. “You should know . . . I have another operation going on right now with Moscow Station. It doesn’t have anything to do with your investigation, but . . . If anything weird comes up on the Moscow end, before you spend too much time trying to figure out what it is, come to me.”

  She nods. This isn’t too uncommon. Special operations are close-hold by nature, restricted to the handful of people directly involved. It could get messy to let one special operation, like her investigation, bleed into another. It could end up contaminating the cases, mislead you into thinking one had something to do with the other when there was no evidence to go on, nothing beyond your own suspicions. This is part of the clandestine life, being able to live with uncertainty, knowing you can never have all the pieces of the puzzle, knowing when you have enough of them.

  “Speaking of the Station,” she says, “I need to talk to Tom Cassidy, but he’s not returning my messages. I was thinking of going to Hank—”

  “You’re not still on whatever it was that Masha Popov said to you?” Eric waves off the idea with his hands. “If there was anything to it, we would’ve found out by now . . . You probably haven’t heard from Tom because he’s helping me with this other operation. I’ll ask him to get back to you—you don’t have to get Hank involved.” That decided, Eric settles back in his chair, a big smile on his face as he thinks about this other operation. “It has a lot of potential,” he says, leaning back into the creaking chair. “Could be really big. I probably shouldn’t talk about it, but . . . You heard about when COS Kiev was killed, right?”

  “It was before my time, but yeah.”

  Eric swells with self-satisfaction. “Well, I think we’re finally going to be able to bring the man behind the hit, Evgeni Morozov, to justice. That’s a big deal to the seventh floor, you know. Something they’ve wanted for a long time.”

  “Aren’t you a little bit daunted, to have to juggle so many potentially cataclysmic things?”

  He chuckles. “No—it comes with being Chief of the Division. I guess I’ve gotten used to it. Life would be dull without it.”

  She’s heard this about Eric, that he likes being the man on the flying trapeze. That he was this way before he moved up in management. Addicted to risk. There’s a sign hanging above his desk in the office, like something a motivational speaker would say: no risk, no reward.

  “I think you’re on the right track here, Lyndsey. It feels—right.”

  “I wish it weren’t. You’re not going to talk to anyone about this until I’ve had the chance to do more work, right?” Lyndsey isn’t comfortable. There’s something about Theresa’s motives that seems incomplete, despite what Eric says. She wishes she felt more comfortable with what she’s just done, admitting her suspicions about Theresa. Eric is technically responsible for this investigation. He has a right to be informed. And yet—as she walks out of his office—something doesn’t feel right.

  * * *

  —

  Lyndsey turns over her conversation with Eric as she drives home, still sick to her stomach for having voiced her suspicions about Theresa out loud.

  Theresa has suffered. It doesn’t feel right to have these suspicions about her. And now she’s told Eric. She wants to trust him. She should trust him. He doesn’t seem like others she’d known, eager to make a name for themselves and not caring who gets hurt in the process. Like the Chief of Station she’d worked for in Lebanon, or the managers in the Clandestine Service who sent her to Beirut hoping for the worst. She’d questioned it at the time—she was doing well with the Russian target, why move her to something different?—but she was told she needed to prove herself on unfamiliar ground. A real superstar will rise to the occasion, Chief of Station Beirut had told her with a glint in his eyes that she chose to ignore. She wanted to believe all the honey they poured in her ear.

  Beirut. As it turned out, her enemies didn’t have to lift a finger. She gave them all the ammo they needed to shoot her down.

  Davis was the opposite of the men she’d tended toward in nearly every way: older, cynical, and worldly. She’d had no intention of getting serious with him. She had played it chaste in Moscow, not wanting to get a reputation, not with Reese looking over her shoulder, and besides, running Popov had kept her busy. As far as the Station knew when she arri
ved in Lebanon, she was a single woman. She was ready to have fun.

  She figured wrong.

  She had played into the hands of the people who wanted to see her fail. Not that she’d had a real nemesis. There was no one specific person out for her blood. No, the Clandestine Service brought her down for sport but also on principle: there would always be someone waiting to see you fall for no other reason than they thought you had succeeded too easily. And hadn’t she gone and proved they were right? A smart woman wouldn’t have taken up with Davis Ranford.

  As Lyndsey walks up the steps to her apartment door, she wonders what Davis is doing at that very moment, wishes she could talk to him. He might not still be in Beirut: he might’ve been sent home, too. Consequences all around. She’d been kicked out of the country so fast that they’d had no chance to talk, and now it was wisest not to try to communicate. In the moment, she misses him fiercely.

  It’s not until she’s kicked off her shoes that she thinks to check her phone and there it is: a little flag next to the pink secure messaging icon. From Masha. Lyndsey clicks it open hurriedly.

  I think we are being followed. We need your help.

  Can she be sure it’s the FSB, Lyndsey wonders, then corrects herself. Of course, Masha would know: she grew up under the old Soviet regime, and her husband worked for internal security for decades.

  Masha and her daughter are in danger. If they get pulled into the FSB’s net, being the wife and daughter of a traitor, who knows what might happen to them?

  If it’s Theresa who’s put their lives at risk, all for some petty form of revenge . . . Lyndsey will never forgive her.

  Go to your sister’s dacha. Watch this app. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.

  Lyndsey presses Send. She hopes it’s a promise she can keep.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Theresa looks down at the notepad, the numbers swimming before her eyes. She is coding the message she needs to transmit to her handler, the ruthless Tarasenko, but she is getting lost in the rows and rows of numbers.

  If she were being run by the book, she wouldn’t be coding by hand. The Russians would’ve given her special equipment for burst transmissions or some other technical wizardry. Every time they try to communicate with each other it’s a risk, the thread that tethers one to the other, damning if detected. Tremendous energy and cunning go into hiding those communications.

  But because of the haste, she must make do: hand-coded messages sent through a messaging app, one that claims to be secure (end-to-end encryption, supposedly even the service provider can’t read the messages and has no access to the encryption key) but Theresa is not sure she believes it. Her freedom and her husband’s fate hang on it, after all.

  She’s been struggling with how much to tell Tarasenko. It’s all calculations and risk. Tell the Russians no more than is absolutely necessary to achieve her ends. Hurt as few people as possible. She winces: she can’t stop thinking about the man, Anton Kulakov, who was killed. She snuck a peek at the report, couldn’t help herself though she knew she shouldn’t. The twisted body, so much blood. It’s all on her; there’s no squirming out of that one. A few days have passed, the overwhelming guilt with it. Rationalizations creep into her head automatically: he knew the risks when he decided to sell secrets. It comes with the job. These seem hollow, even to her, but she clings to them. They are all she has to ward off the all-consuming guilt. Once she’d seen the pictures, she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. It felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She was sick and wobbly all the time, feeling like the world had been turned upside down. They noticed around the office but she told them she felt under the weather, thought she might be coming down with a cold. She couldn’t fool Brian, though. Exquisitely sensitive, he picked up her anxiety like a bloodhound. She had to get it together for his sake.

  She taps the pen against the pad of paper. Tarasenko will want to know how CIA is reacting to Kulakov’s death. You learn valuable things in the aftermath of the unexpected. Mistakes are made in the heat of confusion. If Theresa had been clear-headed, she would have used the moment for a better peek into the inner workings of the investigation. Pressed Westerling, maybe even risked asking Lyndsey a few questions.

  Lyndsey. That’s where Theresa feels the most guilt. She’s grown to like her. It’s too bad they hadn’t been friends in the earlier days, when Lyndsey was one of the new, single girls looking for mentors to help them make sense of things. Lyndsey, she senses, would’ve been a good friend, someone who wouldn’t have drifted away when the political fallout came after Richard’s death. Now, being Theresa’s friend is a career risk.

  Theresa looks down at the rows of numbers, neatly printed out in her precise hand. She will have to run these sheets through the shredder, afterward. Leave no trace.

  Tarasenko will be expecting a message. She left a blue ball in the playground, signaling that she’d be in touch soon—hating that they must involve her son’s favorite playground, knowing it meant some Russian agent was watching it day in and out. Tarasenko would be enjoying her discomfort, eating it up.

  What kind of sicko uses a playground in a covert operation?

  She spent the day thinking about what she would write. It’s not like there aren’t things she could tell them. But she doesn’t want to be invaluable, so the FSB will pressure her to remain in position. She doesn’t want to be the FSB’s star asset. The flames of her anger have died down and now there are only glowing embers. Her desire for revenge has shrunk; all she really wants is her husband’s freedom.

  Now that she’s home, door to the bedroom pressed firmly behind her, she has pulled the codebook out from a shoebox on the floor of her closet and begun her task.

  CIA NOT BUYING POLICE REPORT, BELIEVE FSB BEHIND KULAKOV’S DEATH. ADVISE GREATER DISCRETION WITH NESTEROV. SEARCH FOR DOUBLE AGENT CONTINUES.

  REQUEST EXFILTRATION BE MOVED UP.

  Her gaze flits over the words. Reading between the lines, it calls them idiots for making it too obvious. They’ve made it too hot for her to stay. They’ve put her at risk, but they know that, of course. Their pride and vanity are more important than any asset.

  But she knew that going in. That’s the way it’s always been, the way the game has always been played.

  That’s why she trusts no one but herself. Depends on no one but herself.

  She signs it, Kanareyka.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The next few days are difficult for Lyndsey.

  She tells Eric about the latest message from Masha, hoping he’ll agree it’s their duty to help.

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do for her right now,” he says flatly.

  Lyndsey’s blood pressure spikes. “How can you say that? Her husband is dead and it’s our fault—”

  That seems to touch a nerve with Eric, and his face goes red. “We’ll do something as soon as we can, but you’ve got to stall her. With my other operation about to go off, Moscow Station is stretched thin. I can’t put anything else on their plate right now.”

  She doesn’t know how to argue against that. She knows how important Morozov is to Eric, to the Agency.

  “Keep her at the dacha. We’ll come for her as soon as we can,” he promises. It’s not the answer she wanted, but it’s the best she’ll get at the moment. She bites her tongue. Sometimes the job is like juggling knives.

  That afternoon, Lyndsey sits in on a briefing being done especially for Eric. It’s in the big, fancy conference room down the hall. It has tiers of seats along three of its walls, like an operating theater. In the center, on the floor, is the big conference table, overpowering the room like something out of Dr. Strangelove. People pick random seats as they drift in, looking first to see who has already arrived.

  Eric is the last one, everyone else shifting restlessly in their seats as they’re made to wait for him. His eyes lock onto hers momentarily as he enters the conf
erence room but then he takes his chair at the head of the table, his back to her.

  The briefers tell a fascinating story: analysts found a huge spike in FSB activity after the recent deaths and disappearances. “On the day of Genghis’s death, all senior FSB staff out of the Moscow area were recalled back to headquarters,” the briefer says as a fresh PowerPoint slide pops up showing a map of Russia dotted with thumbnails of various officials. “Communications between Moscow, Washington, D.C., and other world capitals—the channels we’re aware of—have been noticeably higher than is usual for this time of year,” the briefer says. Another map, this time of the world, with graphs over various cities showing rates of increase.

  “Meaning what, exactly?” Eric twitches in his chair, trying to hide his impatience.

  The briefer coolly adjusts her eyeglasses on the bridge of her nose. “They wouldn’t break op sec”—operational security—“if it wasn’t important. The increase in unanticipated communications shows that they were caught off guard.”

  “By Popov’s death?” Eric forgets to use the cover term; Evert Northrop, sitting in a shadowy corner, winces.

  “It’s impossible to know the reason for the increase by the timing alone. As you know, we don’t have access to these communications. Most are encrypted.”

  Eric nods as she speaks, processing. “Were there no other notable events on those days? Something else the Russians might’ve been talking about?”

  “Only routine activity. Nothing that we judged likely to be the reason for the increase.” Lyndsey leaves the room turning this over in her mind. Moscow was surprised. They hadn’t expected Popov’s death.

  She has little time to think about it, however, as today there was an important visitor.

  Shortly after Lyndsey told Eric of her suspicions about Theresa, he decided they had reached the limit of what they could learn from the resources they had at hand, computer logs and access lists and what coworkers were willing to say. They had a suspect now. CIA cannot run surveillance on U.S. persons. For that, you have to turn to the FBI.