Red Widow

by Alma Katsu

  13 august 2018 2323z kincaid, kyle: Sure, whatever you need. How about we meet for coffee

  The last chat session was from a few days ago.

  7 december 2018 1805z kincaid, kyle: How about Wildfire, on Foster Drive? 8?

  7 december 2018 1805z warner, theresa: Sure. I’ll meet you at the restaurant

  You don’t meet for work at a restaurant. Had they gone on a date?

  Lyndsey looks up Kincaid’s phone number, then reaches for the phone. He has some explaining to do, such as why he hadn’t told her about Theresa’s interest.

  But there is no answer. It goes to voicemail.

  She slams the phone down. She can’t wait for him to get in touch with her and besides, he’ll only continue to be evasive.

  She goes to the online white pages to pull up Kincaid’s record. It takes only a minute more to track down Kincaid’s supervisor. She exhales slowly in an effort to calm down, and is surprised when the phone is answered quickly.

  She explains that she’s running an investigation and needs to speak to Kincaid. Can he tell her how to get in touch with him, please?

  There is a strained silence on the other end. Finally, the man says, “You haven’t heard? I guess you don’t know . . . Kyle is in the hospital. He’s in a coma.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Theresa stands outside Lyndsey’s office, listening. She has always been as quiet as a nun. Able to hide from her parents, sneak up on her husband.

  She overheard all of Lyndsey’s conversation with Kincaid’s supervisor. There can only be one reason Lyndsey is looking for Kincaid: Lyndsey is onto her. Once she finds out Kincaid is in the hospital and starts tracing Theresa’s steps, it will be over.

  She will lose everything. Her son. Her one chance to get Richard out of prison.

  Which means all these terrible things she’s done will be for nothing. Betrayed her country, caused one man’s death, probably responsible for a second (though not Yaromir Popov, she had nothing to do with that).

  All for nothing if the Russians don’t pull her out in time.

  Tick tock, tick tock. With every minute, she feels Lyndsey closing in on her.

  Tarasenko is a sadist, keeping her on tenterhooks.

  She feels helpless. She doesn’t like to feel helpless.

  She tiptoes away from Lyndsey’s office, silent as a swan gliding across a lake. She needs a minute alone. She grabs her purse and heads to the ladies’ room. Standing in front of the full-length mirror, she plucks nervously at her hair. Reapplies her lipstick, moisturizes her hands.

  What she needs is a plan, a way to buy time if everything goes to hell.

  She’s pretty sure Lyndsey hasn’t put it all together yet, or else they’d have arrested her already.

  All she has to do is keep Lyndsey from putting the last pieces together.

  There’s still time.

  As she returns the moisturizer bottle to her purse, her hand falls on the tiny Altoids tin. She picks it up, gives it a shake. Is rewarded with a tinny little rattle.

  There’s still half a pill inside.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The details surrounding Kincaid’s hospitalization, when Lyndsey finally hears them, are gruesome. Found alone in a hotel room, half-undressed, unresponsive.

  No one knows why he was at the hotel. His apartment is fifteen minutes away.

  The clerk told police that a woman was with him, but he couldn’t provide much of a description. He didn’t recognize her, which means she wasn’t one of the prostitutes who came through the hotel regularly.

  The Agency’s Security department was working with the police, of course. They always did when an Agency employee was injured or died under suspicious circumstances. But so far, there was maddeningly little. After Lyndsey reads the medical report, she contacts Randy Detwiler. “I’m no poisoning expert, but it looks like one to me. And this is the second poisoning related to this case, which seems like too much of a coincidence to be one.” He promises to look into it.

  She must turn back to the case, as little as she has the stomach for it: Detwiler’s finding on the gelsemium and Molina’s findings mean another late night for Lyndsey. Outside the closed door, she listens as one by one, the others leave for the day. The rattle of cabinets being shut and locked, doors opening and closing. Finally, it is completely quiet, so quiet that she can hear the handler cycle on and off. The air in her tight little office grows stale as she pulls out her files and rereads every report, looking for more clues. Something she’s overlooked. The list on the yellow legal pad grows longer slowly, line by line.

  She puts down the pen and pushes the legal pad away. She wishes there was more face-to-face. She’s better at that, understanding what is meant by every flick of the eyes and shift of weight in a chair. There’s more certainty in the tilt of someone’s head than in their words, at least to Lyndsey. She wants to study Theresa from across a room or behind one-way glass.

  Near midnight, she finds something that was overlooked before. The manifest from Popov’s flight was attached to the toxicology report, at the very back, which may account for the oversight. Somehow the medical examiner’s office was able to get Delta to cough it up. Perhaps the office was afraid of contagion, and thought it might need to track down the passengers if the cause of death was airborne.

  Given what Detwiler told her about the effectiveness of the poison, time of death, and duration of the flight, it’s very likely that Popov’s killer is one of these people.

  Delta flies an Airbus A330 on this route, 335 seats: she knows this because she looked it up already. She eyes the list. According to the manifest, it was fairly empty. Inwardly, she groans: that’s still over a hundred people to check, when you take pilots and crew into consideration.

  There is nothing to do but start searching in Agency databases. If nothing shakes out, if there are no matches, first thing in the morning she will ask FBI to run the names through their files. There’s a good chance FBI will have information CIA doesn’t, information germane to law enforcement, access to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, not to mention arrest records.

  By this point, the office is empty. The last person to leave, Evert Northrop, stopped by her office to tell her so she could lock the door behind him, standard protocol. It’s now one a.m., and Lyndsey pauses in her work. Her eyes are so tired, she’s unable to focus on the words on the monitor. She’s halfway down the list and questioning the usefulness of this approach. So far, she’s gotten a big fat goose egg: not one passenger has appeared in the Agency’s databases, meaning the person has no connection to intelligence, was never an asset or informant, never worked for the Agency, or their name never came up in a report, ever.

  She decides to switch tactics and begins to search on the open internet. What she sees quickly confirms her suspicions: the passengers were mostly Russian businessmen, or if they’re spies, they’ve built a plausible cover. And the vast majority of names are Russian. The few Americans are mostly businessmen, too. There’s a smattering of students, and retirees on a packaged holiday tour. No one on the list jumps out at her yet, and that makes her nervous. The two pilots are former military, and it seems unlikely that one of them would be a secret assassin for the FSB.

  Then she finds something. One of the passengers is former Special Operations—only he’s American, not Russian. Navy SEAL, then Blackwater, then a few years at other private security firms before disappearing into the ether like a ghost. The downward spiral through the industry, frequently switching between employers, is a bad sign. Or maybe he’s fine and not screwed-up in the least and there are other reasons he can’t hold a job. She’s met enough of these guys and heard enough stories to know that some—a minority, but still some—drink the Kool-Aid and get lost, drawn to the use of violence, finding they like being in places where there are few rules and even fewer people to enforce them.

  The
ir resumes read like this one.

  Still, he’s American. The FSB would never hire an American to kill Popov. They have more than enough men to handle it in-house. Nothing to see here.

  Except . . . the name seems familiar. Claude Simon is just uncommon enough of a name not to be something she’d picked up from a celebrity news rag or overheard on television. Could he have been coming home from a private security job in Russia? The odds are long that a job like that would be completely innocent. There are plenty of Russian mercenaries in the country already—why would a Russian company hire foreign mercenaries—and an American at that?

  She goes back to the classified files and starts searching on the name. She tries every kind of database open to her, logs, personnel databases, anything and everything. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  She is jotting the name on the list going to FBI—maybe they’ll have something on him—when one of the open windows beeps at her: she’s got a hit on one of her searches. It’s a reporting database, another internal memo for the record. She leans closer to the screen. It’s late and she’s tired and her eyesight is failing, and she knows the odds of this having anything to do with Popov are slim to none. She’s not even sure why she’s bothering with this level of diligence . . .

  Except it is germane. Or it seems to be . . . She fights exhaustion to make sense of what she’s reading. The report has to do with the planning of an operation in theater a couple years ago, an exfiltration, and there is Claude Simon’s name. Freelance security. Lyndsey reads through his list of qualifications, which all have to do with weapons, the terrible places where he’s willing to work, the terrible things he’s willing to do.

  What was he doing on that flight?

  His business is making bad things happen.

  And a man died on that flight. Could it be nothing more than a coincidence?

  She goes back to the old report, scanning quickly through the next part, anxious to see if the report says who brought up his name. Who knew of Claude Simon. Who wanted to hire him for the extraction team, so long ago.

  Lyndsey’s heart stops for one long beat.

  It was Eric Newman.

  * * *

  —

  Somehow, Lyndsey manages to leave her office. Locks up her notes in the safe—she’s not going to take chances leaving it in a simple locked cabinet now. She drives home through the quiet streets of Tysons Corner even though her mind is racing in a million directions at once.

  Don’t jump to any conclusions now. Get some sleep. Things will look different in the morning.

  They’d better. Because everything she can think of is crazy, crazy, crazy. Not only the link she’s found between Popov’s killer and Eric Newman but Theresa’s connection to Kincaid. And the fact that Kincaid is in the hospital, near death. The truth is still in shadow, though she feels as though she’s getting closer to it. Almost close enough to grasp.

  In bed, she twists and turns, wrapping cool sheets around her overheated body. She is desperate to fall asleep but can’t stop thinking about what it means that Eric once hired the man who may have killed Yaromir Popov. Eric knew him, knew what kind of work the man did. And the man did bad deeds. He was in the bad deeds business.

  It is plausible that someone at CIA hired him to kill Yaromir Popov.

  It is plausible that Eric Newman was that man.

  That thought causes her stomach to clench.

  Why would Eric Newman want Popov dead? More important: even if there was a reason, a valid reason, how could Eric do that to someone he knew and to whom he owed so much?

  The late hour and her disorientation make it easier to free associate. Her thoughts are liquid, slippery. There was a photo of Simon in the file. Forties, a big fit man with a heavy beard. Dark eyes, dark hair. Nothing about him would make you think he has any qualms about what he does. There is a remorselessness about him. He is the kind of man you cut a wide berth should your paths cross. A man who could hunt another man through an airport with a needle hidden in his palm, looking for an opening. Slipping in behind his victim as they queue to board. A quick brush pass, a scratch or needle so light that it’s unnoticeable.

  Yes, she can picture Simon doing it, but why? Why would Eric Newman want Yaromir Popov dead? He had been, at one time, the Division’s top asset. Lauded as a crown jewel by no less than Roger Barker, the hard-to-impress head of the Clandestine Service. Of course, that was a few years ago, when Lyndsey was his handler, but something catastrophic has happened in those scant few years. Apparently, he’d decided not to cooperate since then. To know why, she’ll have to talk to Tom Cassidy. For some reason, Yaromir Popov became expendable. To be completely cold-blooded about it, it was better to eliminate your former assets than to leave them like unexploded bombs.

  But that wasn’t how CIA operated. That’s what they chose to believe about the enemy. That’s why they were the bad guys. You don’t hand your assets over to the enemy. That would be the consummate betrayal. You’d be no better than the Russians. How many times had she heard that from her colleagues?

  Except Eric didn’t tell the Russians that Popov had betrayed them. No: he may have had him killed himself.

  That means the Russians didn’t know Popov had been a spy. The secret would be safe for a little while, until the FSB figured out what was going on.

  Could that be why Eric doesn’t want the NSC to open an investigation? Why was it important for him to keep Russia in the dark a little while longer?

  And if Theresa had turned those names over to them—Lighthouse and Skipjack, and everything points that she had—it won’t take them long to figure out. Two assets are uncovered, a Russian officer makes an unscheduled midnight flight to Washington . . . The FSB will jump to conclusions, it’s the cautious thing to do. This confirms for Lyndsey that Masha and Polina are in danger.

  Unable to sleep, Lyndsey gets out of bed. She sits in the dark in the front room with a glass of cold water, listening to the hushed sound of traffic on Route 7 beyond the apartment complex. Tysons Corner never sleeps, even at three a.m.. A handful of lights are on in one of the new high-rises across the highway; Lyndsey takes a little comfort in the fact that she’s not alone.

  Could Eric be involved in this somehow? She takes another gulp of water, hoping it will jolt her out of this dreamlike state. I must be half-asleep. I’m overlooking something. Why would Eric push an investigation, bring her in, and put her in charge, if he were involved?

  This. Is. Maddening.

  Is Eric the kind of man who could condemn Yaromir Popov to death? The answer is yes—of course. It comes with the job. But there would have to be a good reason, one that she can’t see.

  Some men would resign before carrying out that order. Lyndsey would’ve quit. Why didn’t Eric?

  What she needs is someone to talk to. But the only one she has is Raymond Murphy and she can’t go to him with a half-baked suspicion about Eric. Raymond is not up to being entrusted with such an explosive secret. There’s no way it wouldn’t get back to Eric and, if he’s innocent, he’d never forgive her.

  If he’s innocent. Her subconscious knows there’s a shadow of a doubt.

  There are other ways it could’ve gone down. Yaromir Popov might’ve been poisoned before he got on the plane. A Russian agent could’ve gotten to him on the way to Sheremetyevo or inside the terminal. The timing would probably work. She’ll have to see if Detwiler can tell from the toxicology report.

  Claude Simon could’ve been on the plane for personal reasons. He could be innocent, this could all be an unfortunate coincidence.

  A huge, crazy, unlikely coincidence.

  But she’s never been one to believe in coincidence.

  There’s only one remedy for it. She’ll talk to the FBI tomorrow, see if they can’t find out what Simon was doing in Moscow. That would help put her mind at ease.

  Three a.m. She can
catch a few hours’ sleep, if she’s lucky. She carries the glass to the kitchen, then shuffles to the bedroom.

  THIRTY-SIX

  In the morning, Lyndsey tries to clear her head with a run. Six o’clock and the neighborhood is blanketed in a gray haze, a mix of fog and frost. She starts out at a slow jog past neighbors armed with briefcases and backpacks, heading for their sedans and SUVs, the early-morning shift at one of the many corporations with nearby offices. After a mile, she feels better physically—her heart pumping, sweat trickling down her face—but her thoughts still skitter all over like spilled marbles, no better than the night before. To make it all worse, time is ticking. There’s only a handful of days before Theresa’s Russian handler comes to town and too many questions left to be answered.

  The main thing, however, is that she needs to call Sally Herbert at FBI. It won’t do any good to go in to work right now: she has to wait for normal office hours. Eventually, when she can’t stand it any longer, she swings wide on an empty stretch of road and heads back to the apartment. By the time I take a shower and get into the office, it will be eight a.m., a reasonable time to call.

  Overnight, Lyndsey compiled a wish list for FBI longer than her arm, but she knows she has to pare it back. Like CIA, FBI has limited resources and she can hardly demand that they stop whatever they’re doing to help her out. There is only one favor she is going to ask for today: find out everything they can about Claude Simon’s trip. Why was he on the same flight as Yaromir Popov? And she needs them to find out as quickly as possible. Simon’s trip may be innocent, a simple coincidence, but if that’s the case, Lyndsey wants to eliminate this poisonous suspicion of Eric Newman.

  The eight a.m. call finds Sally Herbert at her desk. “I didn’t have you pegged as an early bird,” Herbert jokes. “I thought you guys in the clandestine service all kept late hours.”