Red Widow

by Alma Katsu

  “I’m not sleeping much since I got this assignment,” Lyndsey answers truthfully, before explaining what she needs. She gives Herbert everything she has on Simon.

  “I’ll see what I can do.” It helps that Herbert has the authority as squad supervisor and that she’s sympathetic. “I’m glad you called. There is another thing we need to discuss, though. FBI needs to stand up an interagency task force. It’s part of our protocol for cases like this. We’re going to pull in a couple agencies to do the work that falls outside our mandate, like the U.S. Attorneys office and State Department. I know CIA is concerned about possible leaks, but we do this all the time. We know how to manage it.”

  Lyndsey had been hoping it keep this tightly held for as long as possible, but she knew this day was coming. It’s going to accelerate now, like a train barreling down the track. “I understand.”

  Herbert hesitates before continuing. “The other thing you should be prepared for is that this is going to be out of CIA’s control very soon. We’re talking about arresting a U.S. citizen and charging her with espionage. Once you bring in other agencies, you can’t put the genie back in the lamp.”

  She thinks of the seventh floor, how they hate to be blindsided. But there’s no doubt in her mind that, if she tells anyone at that level of her suspicions about Eric, he’ll know about it within an hour. He is king of Russia Division. Inside the building, loyalties can run deep.

  “I understand.” Inwardly, Lyndsey roots for Herbert to find something to put her fears to rest.

  “And your boss? He seems to have control issues.”

  Lyndsey swallows. “Don’t worry about him. I’ll handle him.” She prays that she can.

  “Okay. Sit tight. I’ll be in touch.”

  * * *

  —

  Lyndsey is mulling over her call with Herbert when there’s a knock at her door. Randy Detwiler stands with a folder in his hand.

  “I hope it’s not too early in the morning to talk poison,” he says with a smile. He takes the chair opposite her desk; the space is barely able to accommodate his tall frame.

  He slides the folder to her. “The police’s medical examiner shared a blood sample from Kyle Kincaid.”

  Lyndsey flips to the report. “And what did they find?”

  “It looks to be Novichok-7, an experimental agent. Really powerful. He’s lucky to be alive.”

  “And you’re sure of this?”

  “Definitely a trademark Russian poison. Though it’s usually administered through contact, through an aerosol spray, or put on a surface that the victim touches, say on a doorknob.”

  “It wasn’t this time?”

  Detwiler shakes his head, then pushes his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose. “As far as the examiner can tell, it was ingested. That’s his guess, anyway.”

  “He took it willingly?”

  Detweler shrugs. “It does raise the possibility that Kincaid was a Russian agent, and he was given the poison to take in case he was discovered.”

  Kincaid doesn’t strike Lyndsey as the type to sacrifice himself. If he was a Russian mole, and had been found out, Kincaid seems the type to offer to sing like a bird in exchange for leniency. Besides, why would he go to a motel fifteen minutes from his home and get half-undressed before attempting to kill himself?

  “I don’t think that’s what happened.”

  Detwiler rises to leave. “If he ever comes out of that coma, you can ask him yourself.”

  Lyndsey glances back at the report. fairfax county police, office of the medical examiner. At the very top, it reads, Victim was found unconscious in room 207 of the Tysons Inn on Westwood Avenue. Police and ambulance arrived on the scene at 10:14 p.m. on December 7, 2018 . . .

  Her heart begins to race. Kincaid was found unconscious on the nineteenth. She’s seen that date, in conjunction with Kyle Kincaid, before. The chat messages Molina sent to her.

  That was the night Kyle Kincaid was meeting Theresa Warner for a date.

  * * *

  —

  A date with Theresa ends with being found in a coma on a hotel bed. Could Theresa really do something like this? Lyndsey turns cold when she realizes, yes, she could. The woman Lyndsey knows absolutely could.

  Before Lyndsey has time to ponder the implications, Maggie Kimball stands at her door. The office manager has her arms full, as usual. A stop on her way. She tilts her head toward the office. “Eric would like to see you. And between you and me, he’s not in a good mood.”

  He has no reason to be, as far as Lyndsey can tell.

  As she hurries the few steps to Eric’s office, she weighs whether to tell him about Kyle Kincaid and the likelihood that Theresa is responsible. But then there’s her uncertainty over Eric’s involvement in Yaromir Popov’s death. She needs to hear what the FBI finds out, but if Kincaid should die . . . She may run out of time.

  “You want to see me?” She steps into Eric’s office.

  “Close the door.” Maggie was right: Eric is tense. He points to the couch and steps around his desk to join her. “Any update from the FBI?”

  For a moment, she is confused: he can’t know about the call to Herbert, can he? If that were the case, he’d be bawling her out for taking Agency business to the FBI. She scans his face for telltale tics that he’s hiding something, for anger bubbling under the surface, but either there’s none or he’s so good at hiding his true feelings that it no longer makes a difference. What he truly feels, what he truly believes, and what he wants others to believe. “FBI?”

  But he doesn’t seem to notice her confusion. “The next time you speak to them, I want you to let that squad supervisor know that we’re going to have a team on the ground at the time of the arrest. It’s going to be a joint operation. Tell her I’m not going to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

  Is this normal procedure? Eric isn’t in the mood to be argued with. “Okay, I’ll bring it up to her. But—”

  He is too impatient and interrupts. “We’re not going to let them hog all the glory, do you understand? This is our investigation—you’re the one who figured out it was Theresa Warner. This will be a huge deal and we can’t lose the limelight to the FBI. Do we know when the Russians are coming to get her?”

  “The FBI thinks it could be any day now.”

  A huge sigh of relief escapes from Eric. Finally, his shoulders relax, his body unclenches. “Good. We’re close now—so close. Keep a close watch on this, Lyndsey. We can’t afford to make one mistake. We’ve got to bring Theresa Warner to justice.”

  * * *

  —

  The call Lyndsey is waiting for doesn’t come until the afternoon. Lyndsey picks up the secure phone on the second ring.

  “It’s Sally Herbert. I thought this was going to be a simple job. I forgot that nothing with you CIA guys is ever simple.”

  It started off well, Herbert explains. The name is unusual enough to narrow the field. She played a hunch that, with his prior work for CIA and in security, he might be ex-military. Once she concentrated on military records, Simon proved easy to track down. She found him in the Northern Neck of Virginia. The area is old, home to the birthplace of George Washington, rich in Colonial history, now a slow southern graceland, a patchwork of working farms and marinas filled with expensive weekend toys owned by retired executives. “Simon probably lives there because he is an outdoorsman,” Herbert says. According to his records, he’s into hunting and fishing. A member of the NRA, owner of at least a half dozen firearms. Being an independent security specialist makes it possible to live the lifestyle that he does, out in the woods in the Northern Neck with his pickup truck and rifles and his bloodhound. It’s the kind of work that takes him away for weeks and months at a time and pays well enough to afford him the opportunity to stay home and disappear into the woods for long, luxurious spells.

  “I sent a couple a
gents out to talk to him. It’s the kind of job done better in person rather than on the phone. You need to read the body language. The Norfolk office sent two ex-military. They’d have the best chance of connecting with him.”

  The FBI agents reported that Simon’s reaction was—interesting. “He seemed alarmed that two FBI agents came all the way out to his little hunting shack just to ask him a few questions. That set the agents’ radar off. They figured he was hiding something for sure. The more they pressed, the more nervous he became. We knew he had been to Russia, our database confirmed that, but when they asked what he’d been doing there, he got belligerent. He asked if it was a crime to go to Russia, then told them to get a subpoena. That’s never a good sign.” Herbert gives another dark chuckle. “Then he changed tactics. Decided to be a bit more cooperative. He told them he had gone on business, but he couldn’t give them the name of his employer. Wasn’t allowed to. The more they pressed, the more evasive he got.”

  Eventually, Simon admitted to them that he had been on official government business—“You know, playing the ‘national security’ card. He said that if it were up to him, he’d tell them, but they didn’t have need-to-know. I guess he hoped that would be the end of it but of course, it wasn’t. They said they needed a point of contact who could corroborate his story.”

  “Did he give them a name?”

  “He sure did. Tony Schaffer.” She rattles off a phone number. “Know him?”

  It is the name Lyndsey’s been dreading, though she doesn’t want to admit it to Herbert. Tony Schaffer manages classified contracts for Russia Division, handling everything that couldn’t be overtly tied to CIA. She is sure that if she finds the contract from the last time Simon had been hired, Schaffer’s signature will be on it, too.

  “I take it you know this Schaffer guy?” Herbert asks after the silence.

  It feels like she’s been punched in the gut. Any doubt about Eric’s involvement has been erased. Worse yet is having to admit this to Herbert. It means she’s been hoodwinked. Something nefarious had been going on and she failed to see it. “Yeah. I do.”

  Silence. “Look, you didn’t explain Claude Simon’s relevance to the Warner case, but if there’s a connection you need to let me know. Does that mean he was working for you guys?”

  Herbert made it clear at the kickoff with Eric that Theresa’s case belonged to FBI. She’d crossed a line and it was a federal matter now. But Yaromir Popov’s murder—now that Lyndsey doubts it is connected to Kulakov and Nesterov, it doesn’t belong to FBI, does it? The weight of the evidence is that Eric Newman arranged it. She can’t go to FBI with that, not until she knows why.

  “I’m not sure what it means,” Lyndsey says. That much felt fair to say. “I’ll talk to Tony and find out if we sent Simon to Russia.” What she doesn’t say, because she doesn’t need to, is that the case just got turned on its head.

  Herbert waits a beat. “Look, Lyndsey, I’ll give you space to work this through, but are you sure this isn’t something I need to know? It’ll only slow down the investigation if you don’t tell us everything.”

  “You and I know this could have serious implications at the Agency. I don’t want to be wrong. I just need a little more time to be sure of what I’m seeing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Twenty-four hours. Then I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  “I’ll hold you to it.” Herbert hangs up.

  Alone, the realization hits Lyndsey like a baseball bat. She doesn’t have a doubt, not a whisper, not a glimmer. Eric Newman was behind Yaromir Popov’s death.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  There’s a courtyard outside the Agency cafeteria. It’s got a handful of tables, and benches under the scant trees. A huge sculpture stands in a corner, strips of metal with letters of the alphabet punched out in seemingly random placement, inviting further inspection. It’s meant to represent cryptography, and those letters encase a hidden message.

  Lyndsey sits on a bench staring at the statue. The sun is filtered by trees but still glints brightly off the metal, making her squint. She left her desk because she couldn’t risk running into Eric in her current frame of mind.

  What game is he playing? No matter how she twists and turns the facts, she can’t think of one scenario that makes sense. Why would Eric Newman bring her in to solve the case—or not solve the case—if he’s the one who had Popov killed?

  He says he is on her side.

  She looks at the metal sculpture, but her gaze goes right through it. The letters are a tangle. Like everything else, it seems.

  She goes back to her own puzzle, trying to lace the pieces together in a way that tells a logical story. Eric hired Simon to kill Popov. No one knows why Popov was rushing to Washington, but the circumstances imply he had something to tell CIA but didn’t trust Moscow Station. What did he know?

  That’s where she comes up blank. He had something to tell her, according to Masha. Something he didn’t think he could share with Moscow Station. Which could mean he didn’t trust his handler, Tom Cassidy, or didn’t trust the entire station.

  All she can do is think about Eric. Why this charade when Popov was killed, when he was behind it all along? It couldn’t have been sanctioned, then.

  He authorized it on his own.

  She’s afraid of the emotions running through her right now like a raging river. At CIA, you’re trained to be wary of emotions. Emotions cloud your judgment and trick your mind, leave you susceptible to manipulation and error. So right now, she’s fighting with everything she has. She wants to go into Eric’s office and push him up against the wall and demand to know what he’s doing, damn the secrets within secrets, tell me. Why—of all the assets available to him, all the deadbeats and liars and drunks who’ve strung CIA along for years—he chose to sacrifice Yaromir Popov. But you don’t ask the fox to explain why he went into the henhouse when all the chickens are lying dead on the ground.

  She feels eyes on her. She’s sure it’s paranoia, nothing more than an old friend who didn’t know she was back from Beirut, ready to walk over with a big “hello.” Lyndsey looks over her shoulder, expecting to find nothing there, no one—but it’s Theresa. Lyndsey would recognize her trademark red lipstick anywhere.

  Theresa is looking at her quizzically. They haven’t been seeing as much of each other in the office of late, not like at first. Lyndsey realizes, cynically, that was because Theresa was looking for information about the investigation, not out of real friendship. This realization comes with a sting.

  Yet, their friendship felt real.

  Don’t be a chump: it’s all smoke and mirrors. And has been since day one.

  * * *

  —

  Lyndsey suddenly remembers her first date with Davis. He brought her to Bourj Hammoud, the Armenian neighborhood in the city, for a dinner of sujuk shawarma. After dinner, they strolled back down Armenia Street and Davis told her stories from his various assignments, the safe stuff, no secrets, no names. The more she enjoyed herself, the more she worried because it couldn’t be. It wasn’t allowed. If she were smart, she would nip it in the bud, stop it before it began.

  Davis picked up on her silence, and tucked her arm over his, drawing her close. “I know what you’re thinking—and don’t. Don’t listen to them. Don’t let them think for you, Lyndsey.”

  “But, the rules—”

  “Fuck their rules—no, really. If you follow their rules, you’re going to miss the important things. The things that are worth fighting for. You and I know we’re not doing anything wrong, so why should we give up the good thing we could have, just to obey some pointless rule? The thing is, they wouldn’t want you to, if they knew. They need rule breakers. You just need to know which rules to break.”

  * * *

  —

  Theresa is still waiting across the courtyard. Lyndsey has only a second to decide what to do
. She’s angry with Theresa and more than a little wary—she probably put a man in the hospital—but those dangerous emotions tell her to talk to her. It’s not too late to save her. And Theresa has the answer. She knows what’s really going on.

  Yet, too, she knows what Raymond Murphy and the Counterintelligence guys and the people on the seventh floor would think: she’s lost her mind. Theresa Warner is a traitor. She’s crossed over.

  Lyndsey’s heart squeezes. But they did this to her. The seventh floor, Eric, all the people who let her down. They made Theresa Warner into a bad guy.

  At the heart of all this is a greater evil, she suspects. But she has to be able to prove it.

  And Theresa Warner might be the only one who can do that.

  Lyndsey rises from the bench and starts to walk to Theresa.

  Theresa looks happy to see her. She holds something up as Lyndsey approaches: a cup of coffee.

  Theresa laughs. “You look like you could use this. Two pumps of caramel, just like you like it.”

  Lyndsey stares at the paper cup. Theresa’s hand is trembling ever so slightly. Confident Theresa, who would never let anyone see her sweat.

  Lyndsey takes the cup to be friendly. But she doesn’t feel neighborly toward Theresa at this very moment. “There’s something we have to discuss. Where we won’t be overheard. Come with me.”

  * * *

  —

  They sit in Lyndsey’s car in the parking lot. The seats smell strongly of vinyl baking in the sun, and of cleaner with a fruity perfume.

  Theresa’s perfect eyebrow arches. Her breathing is shallow, a fox run to ground. She sips at her coffee, hands still trembling. It’s disconcerting. “What’s this about, Lyndsey? Why are we sitting in your car?”

  Now or never. Once said, it can never be taken back. Theresa could run. The case could blow up, and the truth—the delicate truth, hidden deep within a tangle of conflicting clues—could be trampled in the ensuing investigation.