Red Widow

SEVENTEEN

^{SIX MONTHS EARLIER}

Theresa Warner always disliked hospitals. For one thing, there was the air, so sour. The antiseptic tang of it turned her stomach. And then there was all that uncertainty, long hours of waiting. She never was good at being patient. This hospital, Sibley Memorial, reminded her of past visits: days spent in the ICU when her father was dying, or that time Brian fell from a tree. Four hours in the emergency room for ten stitches to close a gash on his forehead. Fretting over whether it would leave a scar.

She came straight from work, feeling out of place in her navy suit and heels. Everyone else was dressed in comfortable clothes, ready for a long day in the waiting room or at a loved one’s bedside. Then there were the nurses and cleaning staff dressed in well-worn scrubs, but also latex disposable gloves and aprons. That settled it: she wouldn’t touch anything. She wasn’t going to bring some god-awful germ home to her son. Antibiotic-resistant germs were out of control, new ones found every day, ones that ate the flesh from your bones, could kill you before the week was out. And they all lived at the hospital.

Under ordinary circumstances, Theresa would not be visiting Jack Clemens. But Eric Newman had told her that Jack had asked especially for her. Jack was not someone she knew well; he belonged to her past, a former colleague of Richard’s. She was not about to deny a dying man (pancreatic cancer, no less, no coming back from that) but she wasn’t happy about it. Sibley was in the District, not an easy drive from McLean. It meant leaving work early to beat rush hour traffic but worse, it meant time away from Brian. It was bad enough that they were apart the entire day because of work and school, which couldn’t be helped but she resented anyway. She doubly resented any imposition on her time outside the office. Even for a dying man. Her throat closed as she imagined the terrible things that could happen to Brian if she wasn’t there to protect him. A home invasion. A tree falling on the house. She never had this crippling anxiety before Richard’s death, of course. She kept waiting for it to fade but it only got worse with time.

She scurried through the maze of hospital corridors, wondering what Brian was doing at that moment without her. Probably sitting on the love seat in the den with the cushions stacked around him like his own little bunker. The National Geographic channel, his favorite, would be on—it was always on, like white noise—but he would have one eye on the clock, watching for her return. He would be deaf to the sitter, listening only for the sound of his mother’s car pulling into the driveway.

Theresa hesitated outside Clemens’s room, gathering her resolve. You’re here, just get it over with. For Richard’s sake. The hospital bed was surrounded by high-tech equipment. Lit-up boxes, adorned with red LED numbers, beeped. A monitor displayed vitals in lines and numbers. Tubes and wires hung from the ceiling and twisted around the bed rails like vines in a jungle. A nurse stood to one side, squinting at the monitor as she typed at a portable stand.

And in the center of the bed, completely dwarfed by all the equipment, was the shrunken figure of Jack Clemens. He had once been a good-looking guy, secretly admired by more than one woman in Russia Division, but was now practically child-sized and bald from chemo. It made him seem like an old, old man but—Theresa did the math in her head—he should be in his early fifties. A breathing apparatus sat on his face like a creature from an Alien movie. There were dangling tubes everywhere; he looked like a frail white spider at the center of a very large web.

Theresa didn’t notice Jack’s wife at first. She was a chunky, sturdy midwestern sort with dyed blond hair, disproportionately large next to her withered husband. She rose from a chair, a balled-up tissue clenched in her hand. Theresa felt sorry for her. She was faced with a horrible reality: her husband would not be with her much longer. That was inarguably terrible, yes, but it was a blessing Theresa had never had. To see her husband’s death coming. To have time to make that emotional adjustment. To be with her husband at the end. You think this is the worst thing that could happen to you but it’s not. This is a luxury, she wanted to say to Clemens’s wife. At least you get to say goodbye.

She knew she was a bad person for thinking this, but she didn’t care.

On seeing Theresa, Jack Clemens’s dim eyes lit up. A desiccated hand clawed at the breathing mask.

Theresa felt a rush of alarm at the sight. She turned to the nurse. “Should he be doing that? Shouldn’t that stay on?”

But the nurse only pulled the mask off the man’s face matter-of-factly. “Oh no, he doesn’t need this, strictly speaking. It just makes breathing easier,” she explained.

“Theresa. Beautiful as ever.” Jack’s voice was barely audible. “Thank you. For coming.”

Theresa stood by Jack’s bed, determined not to touch anything. Germs. “I’m sorry that it has to be under these circumstances.”

He nodded toward the foot of the bed. “My wife. Helen. I don’t think. You’ve met,” he said, laboring for breath like an asthmatic.

“I don’t believe so.” She extended a hand. “Theresa Warner. Jack and my husband were old friends.” Theresa wasn’t going to explain about Richard or share her personal story with Jack’s wife. If the two men had been close—and Theresa had no evidence of that, Jack’s name rarely coming up in all the time she was married—then Helen would already know what had happened. If not, then, there was no need to rehash it, not with Richard gone and Jack with so little time.

The wife shook Theresa’s hand limply. The grip of a woman in shock.

Jack looked at his wife. “Give us. A minute alone,” he said. How many times had he asked that of her, a CIA spouse? She didn’t seem surprised, not in the least. Secrets, right up to the end.

Clemens waited as the wife and the nurse shuffled out, his eyes trained on Theresa. There was something ominous in his stare, his silence. What in the world could this be about? Suddenly, she wished she hadn’t come. She wanted to leave before he could say whatever it was he wanted to tell her.

“Jack—” She looked longingly to the door.

He held up a hand to stop her. “Theresa, I have something to tell you. I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you sooner.” Then he stopped abruptly, coughing, then reached toward a pink plastic jug on a counter, a bendable straw jutting out of it. She held the jug for him as he drank. It reminded her of the early days with Brian, the sippy cups.

He nodded to indicate he was finished and fell back against the pillows, sweat on his brow. “Pancreatic cancer. Was stage three when… they found it. Nothing worked. Only a matter of time, they said.” Why was he telling her this? she wondered. He sounded sorry for himself, but he must have come to terms with his imminent death by now. She knew, instinctively, that he was telling her for a reason: so she would feel sorry for him. So she would excuse him for what he was about to say.

He dropped a hand onto Theresa’s forearm. “I was in Richard’s office… when it happened. I was Eric’s deputy.”

“I know, Jack.” She didn’t want to cut him off, but she couldn’t do this again. Couldn’t accept one more person’s tribute to her dead husband. Couldn’t hear I’m sorry one more time. “We all loved Richard. We all regret what happened. But whatever it is you want to get off your chest… please, don’t. You don’t owe Richard anything. Let it go.”

But he kept shaking his head, his skull frail and weightless like a dried seedpod, trembling on the end of its stem. He set his bloodless lips stubbornly. “No. I do owe Richard. I know what happened. To your husband. It’s time you know.”

He pulled at her arm, trying to draw her closer. This time, she didn’t resist.

“Richard is not. Dead. Richard. Was captured and held.”

Somehow, Theresa made it to her car. She stumbled out of Jack’s room, past the nurses’ station. Down a dizzying maze of corridors. The walls were spinning so she felt her way, inch by inch. Staggered across the parking lot to her Volvo wagon, where she sat behind the wheel, shaking from head to toe. Blood thrummed in her ears. She couldn’t breathe. White spots flashed before her eyes. She was afraid she was going to pass out.

It couldn’t be true, what Jack told her. And yet she knew in her heart that it was.

Her husband was still alive.

CIA lied to her.

Everything she had gone through these past two years, her suffering, Brian’s suffering…

Never mind that, what about Richard’s suffering? What has he gone through, locked away in a Russian prison?

Was he still alive? Jack didn’t know. He only knew that Richard hadn’t been killed in the operation.

Richard is alive. She had to believe that. The Russians wouldn’t kill him, not if there was a chance of getting anything out of him—or getting something in exchange for him. She knew that much about the Russians.

She gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles, wishing she could wrench it off the pillar, throw it through the window. She wanted to destroy something, to shatter glass, kick, scream. The betrayal hurt like a dagger plunged in her heart. Why had they lied to her? Was there more that Jack hadn’t told her, because he didn’t know?

There had to be.

The treachery was breathtaking.

We got a report a month later that the FSB had an American spy in prison, Jack had told her. But the Clandestine Service didn’t want to pursue it. They wanted to pretend the whole thing. Never happened. Because it made them look bad. How could they admit. To Congress. That the Chief of Russia Division. Authorized a rogue operation? It made them look weak. Out of touch.

Jack had sworn that Eric didn’t know, that the seventh floor had decided to keep the secret from him since they blamed him—and Richard—for the whole fiasco in the first place. Brought trouble down on themselves, was how Jack had put it. Left us to clean up the mess.

No, Eric had to have believed Richard was gone, like everyone else. The way he’d made her life easier in a hundred little ways, it had to have been out of guilt and regret. Did she need time off to chaperone Brian’s class on a field trip? No problem. She wanted to leave early to take Brian to see the doctor? She didn’t even need to ask. He had looked after them—looked after her.

She choked back a sob and dropped her head until it rested on the steering wheel. How could the Agency betray her like this—betray Richard? This was a wake-up call, a hard slap to the face. Work was a twisty place, halls of funhouse mirrors that reflected back only a distorted, partial view and hid a multitude of sins. Nothing was as it seemed. She winced to recall other, far more minor incidents of casual betrayal. Colleagues who had bettered themselves in their boss’s eye at her expense, petty comments made for no reason other than to assuage the speaker’s ego. It was easy to forget that there were bigger betrayals hiding beneath a civilized veneer. It was time she learned that lesson in earnest.

She twisted the key in the ignition, even though she could barely see the road through her white-hot anger. She would drive to Langley now to talk to Eric. To see what could be done, to find out if Richard was still alive.

Theresa was halfway to Virginia before she realized Jack Clemens’s deathbed confession would do her little good. Sure, he had told her the truth—a precious thing among spooks—but it would give her no leverage over the seventh floor. The men who ran CIA were masters of manipulation. That was how things worked at Langley. The deck was stacked. Running at things headfirst didn’t work: you had to come at them sideways. That was why Theresa had never gone into management or reached for more responsibility. She’d always found it too distasteful and—if truth be told—had been afraid she would be eaten alive.

She looked at the speedometer. Seventy-one. Trees streaked by in a blur on both sides. With a startled gasp, she lifted her foot from the pedal: getting a ticket—hell, getting killed in a fiery crash—would not help her or Brian. She had to calm down.

She eased onto Chain Bridge Road, brightening at the thought of heading home to Brian. Langley could wait. She needed to see her son. Time to think. To plan.

She would step up to the challenge. She would outmaneuver the seventh floor, with or without Eric Newman’s help—because, let’s face it, to take on the seventh floor would take an extraordinary level of courage. Courage Eric Newman might not possess.

But she would do it. She would beat them at their own game. She would prove herself worthy of being Richard Warner’s wife.

She couldn’t let her husband down.