Red Widow

TWENTY-FOUR

Theresa returned to the office the next day, though she would’ve liked to stay home, to play hooky like a schoolchild. When she showed up pale and rattled, teammates asked if she was feeling better. “Fine, thanks,” she mumbled. She remembered to cough occasionally to keep them at arm’s length. Let them think I’m contagious. Let them be mad at me, thinking I’ve brought some disease into the office. She wasn’t fine—she wouldn’t be for a while—so she didn’t want anyone looking too closely.

Her son, on the other hand, was not so easy to fool. She’d only been able to hide it from him for a couple hours. By evening, he knew something was wrong. “Are you scared, Mommy?” he’d asked at dinner. Unused to seeing his mother frightened, he was skittish, afraid to get close. “Nonsense, what would I be scared about?” she’d answered with false bravado. It was best to pretend around Brian. He was a sensitive boy, prone to worry.

The meeting with Tarasenko haunted her at work. She’d underestimated her conscience. Guilt coursed through her veins and swelled her throat shut. Going through the security turnstiles that morning, she’d felt like she would burst into flames, like a demon trying to enter a church. One of the damned trying to pass for normal. Nothing happened, of course, though she was still trembling by the time she got to her desk. The usual eyes were on her from the time she left her car to when she arrived at her office. Look, it’s The Widow. Did those curious faces see that something was wrong? Was it written all over her face, etched in the lines around her eyes, hanging from the edge of her frown, engraved in the furrow in her brow? That woman is a traitor.

How long before she would hear from the Russians? A month, two? Never? Volunteer spies were generally problematic. CIA took a long time to decide whether to trust the embassy walk-ins who offered to turn over the secrets in their heads for money, or for a plane ticket to the U.S. and a new life. They were hot messes, unraveling mentally and emotionally, beset by financial troubles, alcoholism, difficult personalities that cost them family and friends. But Theresa’s motive was pure as the driven snow: to free a loved one. She was blameless. How much more trustworthy could one be?

There was nothing she could do except wait. She felt helpless and vulnerable, and she didn’t like it.

Her fingers moved by habit on the keyboard at work as she checked email, read through reports on her targets—not that she cared about her job anymore. The words didn’t even register, falling on her and melting like snow. Her mind was back in the museum, the chill of fear on her afresh, Tarasenko’s wolfish grin impossible to forget.

But she wasn’t helpless. She had two names now—Dmitri Tarasenko and this General Morozov. She would get to work.

Tarasenko had probably been lying when he said Morozov had intervened with Putin to save her husband’s life. If the Hard Man had a personal interest in the case, why get involved at all?

She needed to find out more about the two of them. Best to be prepared. But she had to do this cautiously. It was too easy to tip off Security by showing an abnormal level of interest in a subject that fell out of your purview. Even though she hadn’t seen any sign of them yet, they could be hiding in the shadows, gathering more evidence against her. That meant she couldn’t search on the names, even though that would be the most expeditious. She didn’t want to give Security ammunition to later use against her.

It was tedious, but she started by reading through the reports on the Counterintelligence Division at the FSB. She had no idea how long this General Morozov had served there, but figured his name would turn up eventually. Hours passed before she saw the first mention of him and it was next to nothing, his name and title, one of the participants in a meeting where an important decision had been made. It was excruciatingly slow, like untangling a hopelessly knotted skein of yarn, and she itched to type his name in the search bar and get to the heart of the mystery. But she owed it to Richard and Brian to use her best tradecraft. Now was not the time to get sloppy.

She searched by dancing around the edges. Looked up other attendees at the meeting, hoping to see Morozov’s name come up again. Backtracked when it didn’t, tried another approach.

After lunch, she stumbled onto a second report, this one more substantive.

She was confused at first. It was about Ukraine, not Russia, but the two countries had a long history together, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected. Her eyes skipped down the screen, trying to absorb the story.

Something terrible had happened in Kiev. The Chief of Station had been shot. A wave of nausea passed through her as she remembered the incident, dimly. It had happened around the time she’d been hired so she’d never heard more than general rumor. He’d been shot on the street right outside his home, an apartment in a gated compound that housed American officials. It had been so brisk and impersonal that they thought it was an execution. A man exited from a car as the Station Chief approached the gate, pulled out a gun and fired at him. There had been a security guard on duty at the time, but the assailant managed to flee the scene nonetheless. No one was ever caught. The Ukrainians told the Agency that it was a street crime with no political connotations but of course that wasn’t true. The killer hadn’t even tried to take the Station Chief’s wallet or expensive watch. Theresa’s lip curled as she read: the Russian way, to tell bald-faced lies even when you know you wouldn’t be believed. Like it was a game.

When it happened, Theresa didn’t grasp the significance; it would’ve been impossible for someone in her position, a new hire. Everyone in the office was angry and wanted to do something about it, but the anger was subdued. There were no histrionics, no chest-beating vows of revenge, only a little crying in public. When she wondered why everyone was so stoic, Richard took her aside and explained there was a code of honor at CIA. Whoever did this wouldn’t get away with it. Look at Mir Kansi, the Pakistani who in 1993 had shot CIA employees outside the entrance on Route 123. It had taken four years, but eventually he was found, arrested, and stood trial. And was executed for what he’d done. You kill a CIA agent, we’ll find you. And you will pay.

The horror of those days came back as Theresa read the cable. But what did it have to do with Evgeni Morozov, who seemed to be nothing more than an undistinguished colonel in those days?

An analyst in Kiev Station had figured it out, according to the report. They pulled out all the stops to gather more information. Bribed Ukrainian security, grilled liaison, put the thumbs screws to all their assets. This analyst had camped out in the Station without taking a break, not even going home to sleep, until he had solved the puzzle. He’d pored over every detail, but the picture didn’t jell until he looked at travel data. There’d been multiple reports putting a Russian colonel behind the hit, but it wasn’t until the analyst found Morozov flying into Kiev a couple times before the hit that he was able to pull the story together.

Theresa was sure there was a report in the system with the full picture, tied Morozov to the assassination in certain terms, good and airtight. She just didn’t dare search for it. More recent reports took Morozov’s guilt as fait accompli. Right after the assassination, he was moved into an important position in the FSB and, a few years later, was promoted to general. It was enough to make Evgeni Morozov one of CIA’s most wanted. He had managed to avoid capture or expedient dispatch by never leaving Russia, not after the hit. Always traveling with bodyguards, even inside Moscow city limits.

Theresa pushed back from her desk, stricken. She tried not to let her shock show on her face. The man who was pulling her strings was a mastermind. Her hands started to tremble again. It would be foolish to think she would be able to outmaneuver a man who’d managed to elude the CIA for a decade.

With great effort, she turned her attention to Tarasenko. This was going to be harder, she knew. There was bound to be less paper on him, given that he was younger and more junior in his career.

Theresa did not find the first report with Dmitri Tarasenko’s name until the end of the next day. At this point, she’d looked at so many reports that she thought maybe she was hallucinating, seeing what she wanted to see. Surely it was a different Tarasenko. Her vision was blurry from staring at the screen for hours. She rubbed her eyes and forced herself to focus on the words. It was real; there was his photo, too. He was a few years younger, and there was no ugly scar, but she recognized the cagey set to his eyes, predation simmering just under the surface.

The report itself gave little insight into the man, just included him in a list of officers who were known to have recently moved from the army to the FSB. But it gave her an idea, something out of the ordinary. She decided to call Arthur Brown, the author of the report. He was a military analyst at DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. He might know about Tarasenko and it was less risky than speaking to the military analysts at CIA. And, an extra bonus: her name would mean nothing to him. He wouldn’t know he was talking to The Widow.

His name and secure phone number appeared at the bottom of the report. The phone rang several times before going to voicemail. “I’m looking for information on a Dmitri Tarasenko, now with FSB, formerly with the Russian Ground Forces’ Southern Military District. I’d be grateful if you could return my call.” She left her secure phone number and wondered if she’d ever hear from him.

There was a message from Brown on her voicemail the next morning. She called him back right away.

He sounded like a smoker, raspy and out of breath. “I don’t know if I can help you. Tarasenko left the service in 2010, like a lot of men, after the reforms. Everything I got on him is old.”

“That would still be extremely helpful. That’s what I’m looking for.” A way to understand the man, that’s what she wanted.

“I could send you a few reports.”

“I’d appreciate it.” There was something else bothering her. “For someone you haven’t covered in a few years, Tarasenko’s name seems to have jumped out at you.”

A throaty sigh. “You don’t forget the Butcher of Tskhinvali. He was in the South Ossetia campaign in 2008. You probably don’t remember that—you sound kind of young—but it was a big deal. Relations between Georgia and Russia had been bad for a while, so Russia used South Ossetia as an excuse to push into Georgian territory. It was a pretty nasty campaign, bad on both sides, don’t get me wrong, but the Ossetians wouldn’t have done the damage they did without Russian support. In the end, the UN criticized Russia for its role.”

“And Tarasenko was involved in this?”

Brown chuckled. “He was a lieutenant, eager to prove himself. He was the advisor attached to a South Ossetian unit that was guilty of the worst stuff. We’re talking war-crime-level behavior. Razing towns, dragging grandfathers out to fields to shoot them, every woman in the village raped. Nasty stuff.”

This was the man who sat next to her in the museum. A wolf in human clothing. She remembered the scar on his temple, the white teeth. A cold chill danced up her spine.

“He whipped the Ossetian troops into a frenzy and then he unleashed them. And the UN may have criticized Russia, but there was no punishment. The Russian military rewarded Tarasenko for this. After the Ground Forces were reorganized in 2010, he was moved to a cushy position in the FSB. Where they know what to do with a world-class asshole.”

Arthur Brown’s email appeared in Theresa’s inbox an hour later, as promised, and she read through the reports, one by one. They traced a path of destruction, described air strikes raining bombs down on defenseless villages before the troops came through to finish the job, slaughtering villains who hadn’t been smart enough to flee earlier. The Russians stole anything of value, even livestock, and burned farms behind them. Tarasenko’s name was sprinkled through it all, urging the South Ossetians to give free rein to old grievances, pumping their ire, stoking their hate. All to prove to Georgia that it wasn’t a good idea to stand up to Russia.

Theresa fell back into her chair, stunned. By now it was lunchtime, but she had no appetite. All she wanted to do was go home, crawl into bed, and pull the covers over her head but she was afraid of carrying this viciousness back with her.

This man. This fire-breathing ogre. She was bound to him now. How could she have been so naïve? For her plan to work, she needed to be in control. She would never be in control of either man. Not Morozov the spymaster, nor Tarasenko the bastard.

She pushed those thoughts away. No, she couldn’t accept defeat from the start. She knew she was as smart as them. What she lacked was ruthlessness, but she’d learn. She’d find a way to succeed. She had to: there was no other choice. It wasn’t just Richard’s life at stake, or hers. There was Brian. You don’t give your son over to a monster. It was her job to protect him, to stand between her precious boy and the monsters. Even the cold-blooded murderers and confirmed war criminals. She was only one woman, but she was his mother.

That’s what mothers did.