Palace of Treason

3

The endless buzz of Athens traffic on Vasilissis Sofias Boulevard was audible through the grimy windows of the CIA Station, windows that had been shuttered and curtained since the bureaucrats cut the ribbon on the chancery in 1961. Athens Station, a warren of interconnecting offices, hallways, and closets, had not been repainted since then: An Electrolux canister vacuum from the 1960s lay forgotten in the back of a coat closet beside a 1970 Martin flattop guitar with no strings that generations of officers assumed had a concealment cavity for bringing documents across borders, but no one could remember how to open it.

Deputy Chief of Station Marty Gable walked into CIA case officer Nate Nash’s small office. Nate had half a tiropita, a triangular cheese pie, on his desk that he had bought on the street for breakfast, and he brushed the flaky crust off his pants as he stood up. Gable reached over him and took the last half of the pie, popped it in his mouth, and chewed, while looking around Nate’s new office. Gable swallowed, picked up a framed snapshot of Nate’s family, and held it to the light. “This your folks?” Nate nodded. Gable put the photo down. “Handsome looking bunch. You’re adopted then, or what, forceps delivery?”

“It’s great being in your Station again, Marty,” said Nate. He respected the stocky Gable, maybe was even fond of him, but he wasn’t about to say that out loud. Nate had started his third tour two months ago in the bustling anthill that was Athens Station, happily again under the sponsorship of urbane Chief of Station Tom Forsyth and his cynical, profane deputy.

The three of them had been an effective team, having run several world-class operations over the last years. In Moscow during his first tour, Nate had handled MARBLE, CIA’s best clandestine agent in Russia, until the general was shot during the spy swap they had arranged to rescue him. During his second tour in Helsinki, Nate had recruited young SVR officer Dominika Egorova — code-named DIVA — and together with Forsyth and Gable had engineered her return to Moscow as CIA’s next generation mole in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

The loss of MARBLE to the Kremlin’s treachery had affected them all, but Nate most of all had changed since that evening when he cradled MARBLE’s head in his lap, watching his agent’s blood ooze over asphalt wet with the Estonian fog, shimmering in the reflected light of the spotlights. He normally was nervous and earnest and ambitious. But Nate now had become darker, focused, and less concerned about managing his career, about detractors and competitors.

“Fuck ‘It’s great being in your Station again, Marty,’” said Gable. “We got a walk-in downstairs, Marine Guard just called. Let’s move.”

As he bounded down the stairs beside Gable, Nate’s brain geared up. A walk-in, an unknown person off the street. Go. The clock started the minute the walk-in arrived. The marines in the embassy foyer would have checked him for weapons, taken any packages from him, and buttoned him up in the walk-in room, a windowless, tech-filled interview suite with video, audio, and digital transmission equipment.

Go. A walk-in, could be anything: A madman with aluminum foil inside his hat to ward off alien radio beams, an undocumented exile pleading for a US visa, an information peddler who that morning had memorized a newspaper article and hoped to serve it up as secrets worth a few hundred dollars.

Go. Alternatively, a walk-in could be a bona fide volunteer — foreign intel officer, diplomat, scientist — with colossal intelligence that he was willing to pass to the Americans for money, or because of a crisis of ideology, or to exact revenge against a tyrant of a boss, or to spite a system in which he no longer believed.

Go. A good volunteer is a free recruitment, access established, intel ready to harvest. Volunteers over the years were the best cases, the ones they carved in stone.

Go, go, go. Find out who he is, do a lightning assessment, flip him, arrange recontact, and get him out of the embassy as soon as possible. If he’s Russian, North Korean, or Chinese, he’s on a clock, his embassy counterintelligence watchdogs will note how long he’s unaccounted for. Thirty minutes tops.

On the embassy ground floor, Gable nodded to the marine standing outside the door and they pushed their way inside the room. The fish sauce smell of vomit hit them in the face. Sitting in a plastic chair at the small desk was an old bum, his rumpled suit coat wet down the front with puke, trousers spotted and dusty. He probably was in his sixties, with gray stubble on his cheeks, eyes red and rheumy. He looked up as the two CIA officers came into the room.

“Christ,” said Gable. “Like we have time for this crap. Get him out of here.” Gable gestured toward the door, signaling for Nate to call the marine. They’d walk the old drunk to the basement garage and ease him out via the loading dock. Stop the clock. False alarm.

Nate quickly assessed the man. He didn’t look like an old Greek coot: hands strong and nails trimmed. Shoes muddy but expensive. Disheveled hair cut short at the ears. He had sat straighter when they entered the room, not like a drunk. A little wind chime tinkled in his brain. “Marty, wait a minute,” said Nate. He sat in the chair beside the old man, tried to breathe through his mouth to avoid the cat urine smell of him.

“Sir,” said Nate, trying English, “what can we do for you?” He heard Gable shift his feet impatiently. The old man looked up into Nate’s face.

“Not good English,” said the old man, but his bass voice was strong. More wind chimes. “I give informations,” he said softly, as if the words caused him pain.

“We already got the recipe for muscatel,” said Gable, crossing his arms.

“Not understand,” said the old man.

“Sir, who are you?” said Nate. The old man blinked and his eyes filled with tears. Gable whispered, “Oh for Chrissake.” When the old guy wiped his eye, Nate saw his wristwatch: steel link band, heavy case, “pobeda” (victory in Russian) written on the dark face. Soviet army watch? He remembered Russian Afghanistan vets wore them.

Nate held up his hand. “Give him a minute,” he said.

“My son dead, Ossetia, bomb.” Nate recognized the cadence and accent — a Russian?

“My daughter dead, gerojin.” Russian for “heroin,” thought Nate.

“My work closed. I come to Greece, izgnanie.” Russian word for “exiled.” What the fuck? Gable had shut up by now, and Nate leaned forward, forgetting the stench.

“Sir, who are you?” he asked again.

“Govorite po-russki?” the old man said, do you speak Russian? Nate nodded, and looked over his shoulder at Gable.

“Do you know Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, the GRU?” said the old man in Russian. He had straightened in his seat, his eyes darting between Nate and Gable.

“What?” said Gable. “What?”

“I am from the GRU Generalnyi Shtab, the GRU of the General Staff.”

“What office?” asked Nate, holding up his hand to fend off Gable for a second.

“Ninth Directorate of the Information Service, under Lieutenant General S. Berkutov.” He raised his chin and his voice boomed.

“Holy fuck, Ninth Directorate, GRU,” said Nate out of the side of his mouth.

Gable leaned over. “Identification, documents,” he said.

The old man understood the word dokumenty, and pulled out a faded red booklet. “Voyennyi bilet,” he said to Nate.

“Military ID card,” said Nate, looking at the bio page. The sepia-tone picture was attached to the page by a grommet. “Lieutenant General Mikhail Nikolaevich Solovyov,” Nate read, emphasizing the rank. “Born 1953, Nizhny Novgorod.” He flipped to the second page. “Here it is, Directorate Nine, GRU.” He handed Gable the booklet. Gable went to a small cabinet in the corner of the room, unlocked the doors, and fired up the digital equipment. The old man’s ID booklet would be copied, the images encrypted and transmitted to Langley in the next fifteen seconds. Gable also texted the Station upstairs to start traces — they would be listening real-time to the audio of this interview.

“What did you mean when you said ‘exile’?” said Nate in Russian. The old man’s eyes flashed.

“I directed the Ninth for three years,” he said. His words came out rapid-fire now. “Do you know the work of the Ninth?” He closed his eyes as he recited. “Analysis of foreign military capabilities. Clandestine acquisition of technology to counter adversary weapons systems. Coordination with our domestic armaments industry.” Nate translated for Gable.

“Yeah, what’s he doing in Greece?” said Gable. The old man nodded, guessing what the question was.

“There is a struggle inside GRU now. Putin” — he spat the name — “is placing his people everywhere. There are many contracts to exploit, many rubles to siphon off. I opposed changes in my Directorate, exposed corruption.” His voice dripped with contempt. “I was reassigned to the Russian Embassy in Athens. In the military attaché office, subordinate to a colonel. They may as well have sent me to the camps.”

“And you came to us,” said Nate, knowing the answer.

“I have given thirty years to the service, to the country. My wife is dead. My son was in the army, he was killed six months ago, a needless civil war. My daughter died alone in an abandoned Moscow tenement with a needle in her arm. She was eighteen.” He was sitting up straight now, as if giving a military briefing. Nate was still, letting him talk, for the next step was the critical one.

“Last night I drank vodka and walked in the street. I am a lieutenant general. I wear the Zolotaya Zvezda, the Golden Star. Do you know what that is?”

“Hero of the Russian Federation, replaced the Soviet star,” said Nate.

The old man’s eyes narrowed, surprised that Nate knew. “And za Voyennye Zaslugi, the medal of Military Merit, and Orden Svyatogo Georgiya Pervol Stepeni, the Order of St. George, First Class.” He looked back and forth between Gable and Nate, wanting them to be impressed.

“I have a lifetime of information,” he said, tapping his forehead. “I am still in contact with many loyal officers working in secret projects in Moscow and elsewhere. My duties allow me to make inquiries, to request data. I will educate you about GRU, the technology acquisition operations, about Russian weapons systems.” Nate translated.

“Get him to tell you why,” said Gable softly. Despite not understanding Russian, he was reading the old man as well as Nate now; he knew how close they were.

“Why? Because they have taken everything from me, my children, my career, my life. They ignored my worth and discounted my loyalty. Now I will take something from them.” Steel in that voice now, determination. Silence in the room, the CIA officers letting him roll.

“I know you are wondering, it is the question with every dobrovolets, every volunteer. What do I want in return? My answer to you is this: Nothing. You are professionals, you will understand.” More an order than a request. Nate glanced at Gable — revenge and ego; control the former and feed the latter. Time check: twenty minutes. Set the recontact, someplace secure, someplace they can watch for ticks. Get him out the door.

“I will meet you” — he pointed at Nate — “in two days’ time. You will want dobrosovestnost, bona fides. I will pass the performance data of the Sukhoi PAK FA, the T-50, including the new wing leading edge devices — you in the West have nothing like it.”

And on a rainy night two nights later, on a muddy path in Filothei Park, CIA’s new penetration of GRU, freshly encrypted LYRIC, did exactly that.

In the years since he had joined CIA, Nate had acquired an appreciation of the villainy of the Russian Federation, and of the dissolute external intelligence service, the SVR, twisted progeny of the old KGB. What fueled this Kremlin kleptocracy, what motivated it, was not to bring back the Soviet Union, nor to reinstill the worldwide dread generated by the Red Army, nor to formulate a foreign policy based on national security requirements. In Russia today, everything happened to maintain the nadzirateli, the overseers, to protect their power, to continue looting the country’s patrimony. Nate wanted to devastate the opposition, to avenge MARBLE, to take away their power.

Nate was dark — black hair and straight eyebrows — of medium height, and slim from varsity swimming in college. What colleagues and friends noticed however, were darting brown eyes that read faces, weighed gestures, and narrowed with quick comprehension. On the street, those brown eyes scanned ahead, watched the wings, picked up the peripheral anomalies before there was movement. During surveillance exercises as a CIA trainee, instructors noted, first with skepticism, then with approval, that Nate was always switched on. He seemed to sense the pulse of the street — whether it was a Washington, DC, boulevard or a teeming European avenue — and he blended into a crowd, something that taller, or gangling, or redheaded trainees could not do.

His early fear of failing at his job, despite the signal successes in his young career, simmered alongside his determination not to return to the bosom of his family — father, brothers, grandfather — in Richmond, Virginia. Lawyers who were clannish, boorish, patriarchal, violently competitive, and invidious, they had not individually encouraged Nathaniel in his application to CIA, and collectively had predicted that he would be back to the family law practice in a few years. There would be no pill so bitter than to separate from CIA and return home.

But as the steel was honed, as Nate accumulated experience and concentrated on operations, there was the remaining ache, the one that wouldn’t fade. It had been more than nine months since DIVA had gone back inside — she had not agreed to resume operations with them, furious at being manipulated into the spy swap. Nate had agonized every day, every week, waiting for her sign-of-life signal. CIA Headquarters waited patiently for her to change her mind, waited for the alert on the worldwide SENTRY phone system she would make when outside Russia. Her call would instantly dispatch handlers to meet her in whatever city she designated. But the call had not come — they hadn’t heard from her, didn’t know whether she was working, or in prison, or alive or dead.

Soon after DIVA’s recruitment, Nate had committed the unthinkable operational transgression by sleeping with her. Risking everything. Risking her, his agent’s life. Risking a career that kept him whole and independent, risking the work that defined him. But her blue eyes and edgy temper and wry smile had blinded him. Her ballerina’s body was matchless and responsive. Her passion for her country and her rage at those who coveted power had him in awe of her. And he could still hear the way she said his name — Neyt.

Their lovemaking had been drastic, clutching, urgent, guilty. They were professional intelligence officers and both knew how badly they were behaving. Typically, Dominika didn’t care. As a woman, she desired him outside the limits of the agent — case officer relationship. Nate could not — would not — commit to such an arrangement, for he worried about his standing, about operational security, about tradecraft. The irony of the situation was not lost on either of them: The hidebound Russian was more willing to break the rules to feed their passion than the informal, loose-limbed American. But until she reappeared, until he knew she was still alive, Nate had a new Russian to handle.

Nate slid down the rocky embankment, raising a cloud of dust. Dirt filled his shoes and he cursed. He was in the pine and scrub forest of the hill country around Meteora, Greece, the region of towering rock monoliths hundreds of feet tall, the largest of which were topped by squat monasteries. He looked at the GPS compass in his TALON, the tablet-sized handheld device just deployed to overseas stations from the Directorate of Science and Technology, and slanted left through the trees. There were only six TALON sets in use globally, and the S&T boys had sent one of the first ultralight units to Nate in Athens Station because of the shit-hot agent he was handling. In several hundred meters he intersected the mountain stream — milky turquoise and running fast — which he followed for another hundred meters.

Around a sharp bend in the stream he saw the man he had come three hundred kilometers from Athens to meet, after an epic surveillance detection route. Three vehicle and two disguise changes later, his countersurveillance team had signaled that he was black. Eyes burning from the colored contacts, gums sore from the cheek expanders, scalp itchy from the Elvis wig, Nate had removed the disguise, ditched the car, and made his way to the meeting site, forcing himself to focus. Their smelly walk-in, Lieutenant General Mikhail Nikolaevich Solovyov of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, now code-named LYRIC, stood on the elevated opposite bank, holding a fishing rod. Cigarette hanging from his lip, LYRIC did not acknowledge Nate, but continued casting his fly into the water. Cursing again, and feeling like a first-tour rookie, Nate looked for a shallow stretch in the brook where he could cross. He concentrated on stepping on the slippery rocks to cross the stream.

LYRIC had stopped casting and was observing Nate’s progress with grumpy disapproval. Tall and ramrod straight, LYRIC had a round head with a high forehead, and thin white hair combed back tightly over his skull. The ironic mouth beneath the straight nose was small and thin-lipped, soft and pursed, not like the rigid, two-star rest of him. As Nate made it across the stream and clambered up the bank, the general took the cigarette out of his mouth, pinched the hot ash end off, and ground it under his shoe. The stub of filter went into his coat pocket, the habit of a thousand parade ground inspections.

LYRIC checked his watch — early on he had actually suggested to Nate that they synchronize watches until the young officer showed him the clock in his TALON device, slaved to the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, which displayed twenty-four international time zones, and was accurate to two seconds per decade. LYRIC had huffed and never suggested synchronizing watches again.

“If you had not arrived in the next five minutes,” said LYRIC in Russian, “I was prepared to abort the meeting.” His voice was a deep bass note from inside his chest.

“Tovarishch, General. I’m glad you waited,” said Nate in fluent Russian, knowing the “comrade” form of address still used in the army would please him. He also knew the agent would have waited half the night for him. “This remote site makes timing difficult.”

“This site offers excellent security, with admirable access and egress routes,” said LYRIC, putting down his fishing rod. It was he who had first proposed the Meteora meeting site.

“Konechno, of course,” said Nate, trying not to antagonize the old soldier. Keep the agent happy, start him talking about the secrets he has in his head. He casually tapped the screen of the TALON, activating the recording device. “I’m glad you had time to meet. We appreciate your unique insights.” LYRIC’s lofty general officer’s ego was immovable, fueled by years of Soviet bluster and Slavic certainty that the enemy was at the gate, and foreigners were plotting against the Rodina at every turn. Washington’s bilateral reset policy with Moscow had run aground on these very same xenophobic rocks, never mind that the State Department had misspelled the Russian word for “reset.”

“I am glad your superiors find my information of use,” grumped LYRIC. “At times it seems they underestimate its value.” Nate, not for the first time, noted that LYRIC overlooked the fact that he had volunteered to CIA, that he had been a walk-in.

The afternoon light was low in the pines. They sat on the riverbank watching the sun sparkle off the rapids. The general, an old campaigner, pulled a package of butcher paper out of his pack and unwrapped a dozen chunks of lamb he had bought in a nearby village. Two sprigs of wild oregano lay atop the meat. Nate watched fascinated, delighted, as LYRIC gathered dry tinder, scraped a small flint, and started a fire. “GRU survival kit,” said LYRIC offhandedly, handing Nate the steel. “The best. Magnesium.”

He stripped the oregano leaves and threaded the chunks of lamb onto the woody stems, then pressed the oregano onto the meat, and handed one kebab — he called it shashlik — to Nate. Together they grilled the meat over the open flame, chuckling, trying not to burn their fingers. When the meat was charred deep brown — LYRIC examined Nate’s shashlik critically — a lemon was cut to be squeezed over the sizzling kebabs, eaten with alternating bites of raw scallion.

“I used to cook like this for my children on leave,” LYRIC said, turning his skewer sideways to bite a piece of lamb. “It is good to share food now with you.” He looked down at the fire. In a rush, Nate registered that this relationship was fueled by more than revenge for Russian beastliness. It was more than an intelligence operation, more than the start of a priceless penetration of Moscow’s vast military tech transfer establishment. This old man needed human contact, kind consideration, metaphysical needs somehow to be addressed while CIA debriefed him like a rubber squeeze toy. Will he survive, thought Nate, or will he end up like Korchnoi? He gritted his teeth at the memory, mouthing a silent vow to keep him safe.

“General, it is an honor to share this food. And it is a privilege to know you,” said Nate. “Our work is just beginning, but it has been spectacular.”

“Then let’s get to work,” said LYRIC, straightening and avoiding Nate’s eyes. “Turn on that infernal machine of yours while I brief you.” They sat on a log and LYRIC talked nonstop, a palette of variegated subjects, precisely remembered, meticulously ordered, the baritone words measured, unstoppable. Important points were signaled by a raised finger, an arched eyebrow. Occasionally there would be a personal digression, the grieving, lonely old man would be briefly revealed, then the ramrod general would resume the debriefing.

Nate was thankful for the TALON balanced on his knee — there would be no way he could have kept up by taking written notes. LYRIC was still a new asset, so he let him orate; the stuff was pure gold anyway. Tech transfer operations, thrust vector research, the new PAK FH stealth fighter, target acquisition radar on the BUK SA-11 used by Ukrainian separatists. Specific military reporting requirements were being codrafted with the Pentagon, and Nate would have to handle the general’s steely pride and galloping ego when the time came actively to direct him to collect specific intelligence.

“Your superiors in Langley must plan ahead,” lectured LYRIC, looking over at Nate. He fired up a cigarette and clicked his lighter shut. “Right now they are exulting and wallowing in the initial deluge of my information. Those who crave credit are preening before a mirror. There is excitement, a rush to standardize production of finished intelligence, the inevitable debate about how to handle the new source.” LYRIC tilted his head up in contemplation, pausing as if giving dictation.

“You and your chief in the station in Athens properly should rebuff any attempts by Langley to assume control of the case. If you need ammunition, you have my permission to tell them the agent — what is my cryptonym by the way? — refuses handlers from Washington. Do not tell them I refuse to speak to anyone but you — that is one of the hallmarks of an operations officer fabricating a case. Simply say that I want only locally assigned handlers with superb area knowledge.” LYRIC looked over at Nate as if he were a clerk in a Dickensian counting house.

“I am your case officer,” said Nate. “And you met the deputy chief of Station, who can act as backup.”

“A pity he speaks no Russian.” LYRIC sniffed, flicking ash off his sleeve.

“I’m sure Gable deplores not speaking Russian as much as you regret having so little English,” said Nate. It was time to touch the brakes, lightly, and bleed some speed off LYRIC’s ego. The old man looked over sharply at Nate, wordless, then smiled faintly and nodded. Message understood, a page in the agent-handler dance card turned, respect given and received.

“And my cryptonym?” asked LYRIC, once again the curmudgeon spy.

“BOGATYR,” lied Nate, who had no intention of telling the bombastic LYRIC his compartmented CIA crypt. Bogatyr, the mythical Slavic knight of the steppes around LYRIC’s birthplace, Nizhny Novgorod.

“I like it,” said LYRIC, breaking down his finished cigarette and slipping the filter into his pocket.

“What kind of bullshit is that?” said Gable. He and Nate and COS Tom Forsyth were sitting in the ACR, the acoustically controlled room-within-a-room inside Athens Station. They sat hunched around the conference table, Nate’s TALON in front of them, connected to a laptop. Nate had been translating highlights of his two hours in the Meteora woods with LYRIC.

“BOGATYR,” said Nate, “like a Russian samurai. He’s got a heroic image of himself. I made it up on the spot.”

Gable shook his head. “Okay,” said Forsyth, already five steps ahead. “Keep him happy, keep him talking. A general officer can be tough to handle. Delicate balance. Headquarters is strong on the case. Traces confirmed everything about him; LYRIC’s the real deal, and the intel so far is giving the air force wet dreams.”

When Forsyth spoke, Nate listened. He knew Forsyth’s record was every bit as spectacular as Gable’s — but different. While Gable was killing snakes with a tire iron, Forsyth had been drinking wine in Warsaw with a well-known Russian stage actress — coincidentally the mistress of a Soviet Northern Fleet admiral — who had photographed the fleet’s readiness and deployment schedules for the coming year in her boyfriend’s office bathroom. Forsyth had given her the palm-sized Tessina camera months earlier and she brought the microcassette of film out past customs wrapped in a condom hidden where only her gynecologist would have thought to look. Forsyth had accepted with aplomb. Gable and Forsyth: Natural-born operations officers, and they both knew what they were talking about.

To Nate’s perceptive eye, the relationship between Forsyth and Gable was a pragmatic alliance tempered by years of working together. Forsyth was the senior, but there was never a thought of him ordering Gable to do anything. Gable knew what to do; if he disagreed he’d say so, then follow instructions. Gable acknowledged that Forsyth sometimes thought he was undiplomatic, but they both knew that golden-boy Forsyth had at various times in his career himself gotten into serious bureaucratic trouble by speaking his mind, once memorably to a member of Congress visiting Rome Station on an endless string of summer recess Congressional delegations — they were called fact-finding trips for the benefit of the taxpayers — during which Forsyth noted that she was three hours late for her Station briefing, pointedly looking at the half dozen Fendi, Gucci, and Ferragamo shopping bags carried by her chief of staff. Gable had not been present, a small blessing, but Forsyth was in the penalty box for a year after that.

Nate saw mutual respect, knew there was loyalty, guessed at comradely affection. The COS and his DCOS watched each other’s backs, they naturally sensed what the other was thinking, and they knew what came first: operations, which informed everything they did. Everything. Nate did not know it, but Forsyth and Gable had argued with Chief of Counterintelligence Simon Benford over the issue of Nate’s intimacy with Dominika. In the Agency it was an infraction of the highest order: Previously other officers famously had slept with assets and had been separated from the service. But even as Forsyth scolded, and Gable threatened, and Benford raved, Forsyth convinced Benford to give young Nash a break. It was not only because Nate had handled MARBLE, DIVA, and LYRIC flawlessly; it was not only because they recognized in Nash an exceptional internal ops talent; in the end, it was a veteran assessment that the greater good was being served by ignoring for the moment the lesser transgression. But they would never let Nate know.

The TALON recording of the meeting suddenly was interrupted by three woman’s screams, high, strident, one after the other.

“Fuck’s that?” said Gable. The screams repeated over the sound of LYRIC’s voice.

“Peacocks,” said Nate. Two of them came out of the woods and started calling. Scared the shit out of us.”

“Peacocks! Jesus wept.” said Gable.

Forsyth started laughing. “Make sure you tell Headquarters about the birds when you forward the digital file. The suits will think you brought a woman to the debriefing for the general.”

“Not a bad idea, but where would Nash find a woman?” said Gable.

They were gathering up papers when Gable told Nate to sit back down. Forsyth waited by the soundproof door, his hand on the latch. They would not talk about LYRIC, refer to him or the case, or even mention the cryptonym, outside this Lucite-walled room. No exceptions: Moscow Rules. The case was already in compartmented, Restricted Handling channels in Headquarters. Not more than fifty people at Langley read incoming LYRIC cables.

“As much as it pains me to admit it,” said Gable, “I want you to know I think you did a fucking great job when LYRIC walked in.”

Nate shifted a little in his seat. Gable was not one to give out compliments.

“I would have thrown the pukey old man out of the walk-in room. You followed your instincts, nailed your hunch, and we got a platinum case on the books. Good job.” At the door Forsyth smiled.

“Now comes precision, now comes focus. I want you to run this agent as tight as a bar hostess in Vientiane,” said Gable.

“I’m not sure I get—”

“I’ll explain it to you when you graduate high school,” said Gable.

“I’ll look forward to it,” said Nate.

“That don’t mean you can skate,” said Gable, “especially at the start of this tour. You haven’t done squat on your own power since you got here. I’m watching you, Nash.”

Forsyth chuckled. “Nate, I think Marty’s trying to tell you he likes you,” said Forsyth. He popped the latches on the ACR door.

“Jesus wept,” said Nate. A moment of silence, and then the sound of Forsyth’s laughter boomed down the hallway.

During their previous time in Helsinki, DCOS Gable had watched over young Nate, had kicked him in the ass, and had taught him valuable lessons: Always protect your agent, never trust the flatland cake eaters at Headquarters, make the hard operational decisions, and don’t worry about the fucking politics.

Gable was fifty-something, a knuckly, leather-faced, crew-cut case officer who carried a Browning Hi Power in a Bianchi belt loop holster, and who had made his bones in every backwater capital in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. He had recruited sweating, chittering equatorial ministers, passing a bottle of Ugandan scotch back and forth inside a sweltering Land Rover. He had debriefed a Burmese four-star while holding a roll of toilet paper and watching for blue-scaled pit vipers in the buffalo grass as the general squatted, stricken with dysentery. And Gable had carried his agent out of the Andean jungle in a tropical downpour — the first ever penetration of the Shining Path in Peru — after the case went bad.

The three of them — the senior, placid Forsyth; the china-smashing Gable; and resolute Nate — were each of a different grade and temperament, but in traditionally rank-neutral CIA they were a crew, bound by the rigors of past operations and the unacknowledged brotherhood of working together in their clandestine world. And now Nate had his assignment to Athens and they were back together. All except Dominika, who was unaccounted for, out of contact.

In Helsinki, Gable had coached him while Nate recruited Dominika, a spectacular success for a junior CIA officer. But Gable also quickly sensed that Nate and his agent had been intimate. “Are you fucking nuts?” he had raved at Nate. “You’re jeopardizing her life, your agent’s life.” Nate had tried backpedaling until Gable shut him up. “Don’t fucking deny it,” said Gable. “Your only job is to protect her, not because you love her, not because it’s regulations. You fucking do it because she agreed to produce intel for you and put her life in your hands to do it. And you sacrifice everything to make sure she stays alive. Nothing is more important.” Nate remembered the words even as he thought about Dominika, somewhere in Moscow.

Then — Chief of Station Tom Forsyth, also around fifty, tall and slim, with salt-and-pepper hair perpetually tousled by reading glasses pushed up and on top of his head, agreed with his deputy. But unlike the swift ass-kicking promised by Gable, Forsyth had called Nate into his wood-paneled Helsinki Station office and delivered an hour-long high mass of agent handling rules so nuanced, so brilliantly clear, that Nate didn’t move in his chair. Preserving the intel flow was his duty, Forsyth had said, it’s why he was a case officer, and if he couldn’t control personal urges, well maybe they should have another discussion about what Nate might like to do for the rest of his life. Not daring to breathe, Nate looked at his hands. He raised his head, looking for permission to speak. Forsyth nodded.

“Tom, what if my being with her is what she wants. What if it makes her a better spy?”

Forsyth pushed his glasses on top of his head. “It’s not without precedent, giving agents what they want,” he said. “We’ve fed agents’ heroin habits to keep them reporting. I remember a porn-addicted Chinese minister who wouldn’t make meetings unless we had the fuck films rolling when he walked into the safe house. And the shoes, boxes of them, for the Indonesian president’s wife. Jesus she tried on every pair, with me on my knees, working the shoe horn. But we’re not talking about that, not exactly.” Forsyth swiveled in his chair.

“A million years ago, my first tour, I recruited a code clerk from the Czech Embassy in Rome,” Forsyth said. “Cute little thing, shy, couldn’t go out on her own. Cipherines, they called them, had to have an accompanying escort all the time, an older woman, an embassy wife.

“We had an Italian support asset — young guy, sold stereos, but looked like a movie star. Over the space of six months, he seduced the older lady, so every time the two women came out on Saturday afternoon, the escort would sprint up the Via Veneto to get to Romeo’s apartment, leaving our little flower alone. And I was there. Took another six months, but she started bringing out copies of cable traffic, intel service details, counterintelligence stuff, correspondence with Moscow, some pretty good East Bloc intel — back then Headquarters was nuts for it. Fucking Cold War.”

“How did you recruit her?” said Nate. “Sounds like she would have been terrified.”

Forsyth spun back in his chair. “It took a while; we walked in the park a lot. I heard about the older brother in the army a hundred times. Started talking about her life, and her dreams — she was twenty-four for Christ’s sake. When she began talking about her work at her embassy, about her code books, it was done, my first recruitment. But it didn’t last.”

Nate waited: Forsyth wasn’t done. “We were both kids. We had been sleeping together, it’s how I closed the deal,” said Forsyth, looking at Nate evenly. “I had genuine feelings for her, but I also told myself a lovesick girl would do more for me. I got emotionally involved and I took my eye off the ball. And she tried smuggling out a reel of crypto tape to surprise me and they stopped her at the front door. Romeo’s girl told him the whole story. Czechs caught her and sent her home, maybe prison, maybe worse. We never heard.”

Nate didn’t say anything. Cars on the boulevard outside were honking at something.

“My chief in Rome didn’t fire me,” said Forsyth, “and twenty years later I’m not going to fire you… yet.” They stared at each other for ten seconds, then Forsyth pointed to the door. “Go out and start stealing secrets. Protect DIVA. Run her professionally. It’s ultimately your decision.”

Cut small cubes of lamb and marinate in lemon juice, oregano, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Thread lamb on skewers and grill until crispy and brown. Slather with thickened yogurt. Serve with onion and cucumber salad.