Red Widow

TWENTY

Lyndsey is back at her desk, mulling over her conversation with Northrop, when she notices the chat window on her monitor is flashing. Raymond Murphy sent a message while she was away: You’ve got access to Pennantrace. Pennantrace is the cover term for Olga Boykova, the asset Richard Warner was trying to save when he was killed.

There’s more to the message. Physical records have been destroyed.

Irritation flares in her brain. It does seem suspicious, even though accidents have been known to happen to archived documents. But for a case this controversial, under such scrutiny?

It appears all is not lost, however. Murphy has one piece of advice: Suggest you speak to Edward Sheridan, the reports officer at the time. He’s on a detail to National Defense University.

The drive to Fort McNair isn’t pleasant but the campus makes up for it. It is hard to believe something this open and green could exist within the boundaries of Washington, D.C. Lyndsey is early for her appointment, so she takes a lap of the campus for the view. A few soldiers jog by in gray athletic uniforms, while a young officer appears to be showing his family around the monuments on the green. How tempting it must be to take one of these details out of the building, if you’re with the Agency. To get out of the cross fire, where there’s no target on your back.

She finds Sheridan outside the library, where he suggested they meet. He’s an older gentleman with thinning brown hair and glasses, with the bland look of a man who is already retired in his mind. He shakes her hand. “I thought maybe we could take a walk. It’s such a lovely day.”

They have the sidewalk to themselves as they stroll the promenade. She keeps pace with Sheridan’s unhurried meander. “I’m not sure I can answer your questions about Russia. I’ve tried to put that episode behind me,” Sheridan says. Of course: it didn’t end well and there are unhappy memories. That’s probably why he ended up here, to finish out his career quietly.

She didn’t drive all the way out here to fold easily. “With the records lost, anything you can remember would be of help…”

Sheridan sighs, thinking for the span of a few strides. “I remember that Boykova was a complete surprise. We couldn’t believe it when we got the first drops. It was solid gold. Putin’s talking points for upcoming negotiations. Background papers. Decision memos. It was like having keys to Putin’s inner sanctum. We knew exactly what Russian leadership was thinking.”

His joy is still apparent, even after all this time. Lyndsey remains silent, waiting for him to continue.

“Naturally, we thought that the asset must be very, very senior. It had to be someone close to Putin, perhaps an oligarch who had grown rich from Putin’s patronage but had developed a conscience and could no longer stand by while the country was being plundered. Or a top aide who knew all of Putin’s appointments and made sure the right papers were read in advance.” Sheridan turns and gives Lyndsey a sheepish smile. Nearly apologetic. “But Olga Boykova was none of those things. Olga Boykova was a housekeeper.”

Lyndsey can scarcely believe what she’s hearing as Sheridan lays it out. It sounds like a strange, political version of Cinderella. Boykova started at Novo-Ogaryovo, Putin’s official residence just outside of Moscow proper, polishing the floors and working her way up in the household staff. Soon, she was assigned to the small team in the office wing. She had risen quickly despite her youth and lack of seniority—the older members, with a great sense of entitlement, guarded their standing jealously—because she had proven herself an exceptionally hard worker. In a society where initiative and competency were viewed with suspicion, it seemed President Putin appreciated having one person who could find a book when it had been misplaced or turn down sheets exactly the way he liked.

She had been working in Putin’s household for five years when she decided to spy for America.

“It’s not uncommon for foreign intelligence services to recruit household staff as paid informants, but these assets tended to provide little more than tactical information,” Sheridan says. “They could tell you if a principal was drinking more heavily than normal, or who in the inner circle might be open to approach, but often lacked the know-how to go after really good stuff.”

Sheridan walks slowly, hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket. Olga Boykova, he says, appeared to have no such reservations. Richard’s reports documented her deep, irrevocable disappointment in the Russian president. She saw how the elites lived while knowing, intimately, the hopelessness that the average Russian faced. It was no longer the wild, frontier days of her childhood, the time after Gorbachev and later Yeltsin when the Soviet system imploded, the economy tanked, and lawlessness threatened to destroy Russia. Order had been restored, but the badness had only gone underground, disguised itself with fancy new clothes. Now oligarchs siphoned off Russia’s money and hid it in overseas bank accounts, Russia’s wealth unaccountably gone like a once-healthy man suddenly drained of blood.

Vampiry. And she knew who was to blame.

A single, childless woman who had come to Moscow to find work, Boykova was fiercely devoted to the brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews she had left behind in the country. All of them were struggling, she had told Richard in a confession that had made its way into a report. Every day, the average Russian got further and further behind in debt, squeezed on every front to pay more, money that found its way into the pocket of some Putin crony. While people like Boykova drank themselves to death to forget that there was no hope of escape, that they would always be a serf to a self-appointed tsar.

She could not stand by and let him steal her country.

“We were amazed to see what a lowly housekeeper had been able to do. She photographed hundreds of documents. She planted mics and cameras in the most off-limits areas in the palace. She was one of the most daring operatives we’d ever seen, with no regard for her personal safety. Richard”—Sheridan stumbles at the name, choking up—“admired her. He used to say Olga Boykova gave us more in her two years spying for CIA than more highly placed assets managed in their entire careers. Many assets string their handlers along with promises and excuses, you know, hand over dribs and drabs of near-useless information that could’ve easily been had through less dangerous means, and ask for a lot of money. Olga Boykova made them look like fools. Greedy, fearful fools.”

He reaches into his breast pocket and hands Lyndsey a photo of Boykova, obviously taken by a member of a surveillance team during the vetting period. She is a little bird, just sturdy enough to move furniture and spend long days polishing woodwork. Her face is small and triangular with a tiny pursed mouth, serious eyes, and a sober expression. You can see her uniform under a winter coat, sturdy shoes with crepe soles, heavy tights like something a much older woman would wear. In many ways she is the opposite of Theresa, and it makes Lyndsey smile to think of Theresa’s suspicion: surely this wasn’t the sort of woman Richard would fall in love with.

Lyndsey understands why the FSB covered up the whole thing. Normally, if they’d found a traitor and caught the Americans red-handed, they would crow from the rooftops, splash pictures all over the internet, and make the most of it. But they were afraid. Olga Boykova would become a cult hero, a Robin Hood to the Russian people. It would embolden copycats and there weren’t enough FSB officers in Russia to spy on all the disgruntled cooks and nannies in every oligarch’s or corrupt official’s household—if they were allowed to find out about her. So, the FSB swept the whole thing under the carpet. “They even refused to return Richard’s body, because it would be evidence,” Sheridan says. A gust of wind lifts strands of his hair over his head, revealing the shape of the skull beneath. “That’s how afraid they were.”

Lyndsey thanks Edward Sheridan with a handshake and heads back to her car, her mind whirling with each step. Knowing what Theresa thinks—what she’s shared, anyway—Lyndsey has to believe these reports would give Theresa some comfort. She’d see the valuable information Boykova gave them, and while she might never agree with what Richard did, she might begrudge his sacrifice a little bit less.

It might give her some peace.

She thinks back to the crude network diagram and how Theresa’s name kept popping up. A mistake, surely. There has to be an explanation.

The two thoughts rattle around in the back of her mind during the drive back.

Lyndsey has just taken off her coat and settled back at her desk when there’s a knock at the door. Jan Westerling stands in the doorway, wobbling uncertainly on those four-inch heels. “I thought of something. Someone, actually.”

Westerling sits in the chair opposite Lyndsey’s desk like a reluctant witness at a police station. The reports officer is visually nervous, her fingers intertwined to keep them occupied, thumbs wrestling. Whatever she’s got to say, she doesn’t want to say it, would prefer to keep it bottled up inside. But duty prevents her.

Lyndsey listens patiently as the words come spilling out. How it didn’t seem strange to her at first when Theresa Warner came to talk to her. They work in the same office on the same team, after all, The Widow’s desk just fifty feet away. After the second visit, however, Westerling wondered why Theresa Warner was being friendly now when she’d been in the office for over a year and Theresa hadn’t shown any interest in her in all that time. She dismissed this as being paranoid. Westerling had gotten kudos for a recent project: sometimes that thawed out the old-timers. They would suddenly notice you, as though you hadn’t been toiling away in obscurity under their noses. She decided at the time to be happy about it, not bitter. She hadn’t thought to be suspicious.

Until now.

“Did she try to find out Lighthouse’s identity?” Lyndsey asks.

Westerling narrows her eyes as she thinks. “I’d say yes, definitely, but in a roundabout way. Not asking directly, so my radar wouldn’t go up.”

“When was this?”

Squints, again. “About four months ago, maybe? No, four months for sure, because it happened right around the time of the annual conference with the Brits and she made a point of saying she’d recommend that I got to go this year.”

“But you didn’t give her Lighthouse’s true name or where he worked?”

Westerling pulls back as though hurt. “Of course not.”

Then would Theresa—if she is the mole; Lyndsey chides herself for the mental slip—have found it? “Do you have this information written down anywhere… paper copies of reports?”

Westerling knits her brow. “Of course. But I keep that stuff in my safe.”

“Could you do me a favor? Could you get all those reports from your safe and bring them to me? But try not to touch them, and put them in a folder or envelope before you bring them to me.” It’s a long shot, but perhaps they can get fingerprints off them. She’s not even sure there’s someone at the Agency who can dust for prints, or if it’s possible to get fingerprints off paper, but it’s worth a try.

Westerling gives her a perplexed look, but she nods, and leaves.

Once Lyndsey is by herself, she rifles through a drawer until she finds what she’s looking for: the network diagram from the other day. Theresa’s name is all over it.

But so is Evelyn Wang’s. The name Kincaid had mentioned.

She spends another few minutes studying it more closely, then logs in to the forum, searching out Wang’s profile. She has a ridiculously high number of posts, far above average. Lyndsey starts reading through them, in reverse order, and finds it’s just as Evert Northrop said: Evelyn Wang is a friendly girl. She sprinkles pleasantries on every thread. Maybe she’s trying to make friends—or more accurately, keep from making enemies. Or maybe she’s trying to win Miss Congeniality. Could she be the mole? It doesn’t seem likely.

Then there’s Theresa. Lyndsey remembers her first day back in the office, the coolness.

Not Miss Congeniality. Unless it serves a purpose. Still—is that fair? Since then, Theresa has been good to her. The warmth feels genuine: stopping by to say hello every morning, dropping off homemade banana bread wrapped in foil (I made too much and thought you might like some… I don’t suppose you’re much of a baker).

Banana bread? Don’t be a sap.

Lyndsey lets out a long breath. Finally, the clues are starting to come together.

The only problem is, she’s not sure she likes the direction they’re headed.