Red Widow

TWENTY-FIVE

^{PRESENT DAY}

The little office is oppressive now. It’s become Lyndsey’s prison cell.

She doesn’t want to make Theresa suspicious by going in and out too often. At the same time, she can barely stand to be in there, knowing Theresa is just beyond the door.

Is Theresa the mole? It’s not as though she has much evidence to go on. Still, she remembers Jan Westerling’s face when she told her Theresa had asked about Kulakov: she knew that was peculiar. And Kincaid… Lyndsey felt he wasn’t being forthcoming with her.

Theresa. Despite the contradictory evidence, there’s something there. She’s sure of it.

You’re the human lie detector, aren’t you? You should be able to tell just by looking at her. Lyndsey flinches; she’s always hated that nickname. Besides, it doesn’t work that way and she knows it.

Lyndsey has gone for coffee twice this afternoon, even resorting to the office pot of tar because it gave her an excuse to walk by Theresa’s desk. Half the time, Theresa isn’t even there, and Lyndsey slinks around the office to see who she is speaking to. It could point to the next asset to disappear. Then when Theresa is at her desk, their eyes meet, and Lyndsey worries that Theresa might be able to tell that something is amiss. Lyndsey may know all the things that give you away but she’s not capable of preventing them. She’s not a hardened liar. How did she come to be in this strange situation, not one she ever expected, suspecting—knowing—one of her colleagues is a traitor?

The part she can’t understand is why: why would Theresa betray CIA? There’s no reason that she can see—unless it had something to do with Richard’s untimely death. Still… It would take a lot for a professional intelligence officer to turn traitor.

First, she has to evaluate the other suspects. Wang—she’s a long shot, and it’s perplexing that Kincaid gave her name. Could he be confused?

She presses her hands to her forehead. With all the recent developments, she’s pretty sure that she’s the one who’s confused. She could use someone to talk it over with.

Eric’s office is steps away.

She raps gently on his door. “Do you have a minute?” she asks.

He nods. She closes the door and takes a chair opposite his desk.

“Have you found our mole?”

“I still need to do more research… there’s conflicting information…”

“I get it, I get it, you retain the right to change your mind, but you wouldn’t have come to me if you didn’t have something. Out with it. Who do you think it is?”

This is her last chance to keep this to herself. In the pit of her stomach, however, she knows there’s a chance she’s right. She owes it to the Agency to speak out.

“I think… it might be Theresa Warner.” She holds her breath, unable to believe she’s said this terrible thing aloud. Accused her friend of the worst kind of betrayal. Tell me I must be joking. Tell me it’s not possible.

But his expression remains carefully composed as he reaches for a pen lying abandoned on the desk. He starts tapping it against the blotter. “I’m not going to say you’re crazy. You must have a reason for coming to this conclusion. Walk me through it.”

She goes through the work she’s done, every step of it. She tells him about the poison analysis, the conversations with Westerling. She lays out the conflicting information, too, and that CI seems ready to pin it on Kate Franklin.

“That was really unfortunate, about Kate…” Eric says. “But you’re sure that you don’t agree with CI? You’re not just saying that out of pity?”

“If I thought she was the responsible party, I wouldn’t hesitate to say so. But… CI is being overaggressive. I don’t think Kate was the mole.”

Eric sighs with relief. “I’m glad to hear you say that. I didn’t think so, either. Not that I had any insight into this particular case; I’m saying that from what I know about Kate. But you wouldn’t be so sure about Kate if you didn’t have clues leading in another direction—am I right?”

When she comes to the part about examining the metadata, she hesitates. “I’m not finished with that. Depending on what I find… that could change everything. It could point to someone else. It could exonerate her.”

“Or it could be the nail in the coffin,” he says flatly.

This is what she has been afraid of, Eric jumping to conclusions. “But it makes no sense. The Russians killed her husband. Why would she help them?”

She’s been counting on this being the moment when Eric agrees and says there’s got to be some clue they haven’t picked up on yet, a clue that will reveal the real traitor. Stop me from turning in my friend. But that’s not what Eric is about to say, not judging by the grim set of his face.

“Losing Richard was hard on Theresa—who am I kidding? It was hard on everyone who was Richard’s friend, but none of us can really know what that was like for her. It could be… that she’s twisted the story around in her head, and instead of being mad at Richard for taking such an insane risk—because that’s what it was, practically suicidal—she blames the Agency. After it happened, she waged an incredible crusade, trying to get the Director to look into it, when it was an open-and-shut case. What did she expect to find?”

Lyndsey opens her mouth but doesn’t know what to say.

“She might think it’s my fault, too. I wouldn’t blame her. Maybe I should’ve stopped him. I could’ve put an end to it. But the asset was his big coup, you know. His claim to fame. If he could exfiltrate her from under the FSB’s nose, well, it would be the stuff of legends. He wanted to try it and I didn’t feel I could take that away from him. I didn’t expect it to go so wrong—none of us did, obviously.”

His regret is palpable. It’s as though the ghosts from two years ago fill the room, all the anger and drama and regrets. “It’s done. You learn from it—but you have to let it go.” It’s all she can think to say.

“As crazy as it sounds, if Theresa has gone to the Russians as a way to get back at us… I hate to say it, but I can see it. She’s lost everything, and she wants us to suffer, too.”

Can Lyndsey see that, too? She thinks of the conversations over coffee in the cafeteria. The bitter asides. The warning from Maggie. Yes, she can see it. It’s a possibility.

“If this is true… If this is the case, Lyndsey, we have to bring her down. She can’t get away with it.”

“Of course.” It goes without saying. She never thought that in her career she’d find a traitor in their midst, but now that she has she knows what her duty is.

Eric leans toward her. “Don’t tell anyone else about this. Confirm your suspicions, then come to me first. We’ll figure out the next steps—together.”

He stands and paces away from his desk, strangely energized, like a fuse has been lit. “You should know… I have another operation going on right now with Moscow Station. It doesn’t have anything to do with your investigation, but… If anything weird comes up on the Moscow end, before you spend too much time trying to figure out what it is, come to me.”

She nods. This isn’t too uncommon. Special operations are close-hold by nature, restricted to the handful of people directly involved. It could get messy to let one special operation, like her investigation, bleed into another. It could end up contaminating the cases, mislead you into thinking one had something to do with the other when there was no evidence to go on, nothing beyond your own suspicions. This is part of the clandestine life, being able to live with uncertainty, knowing you can never have all the pieces of the puzzle, knowing when you have enough of them.

“Speaking of the Station,” she says, “I need to talk to Tom Cassidy, but he’s not returning my messages. I was thinking of going to Hank—”

“You’re not still on whatever it was that Masha Popov said to you?” Eric waves off the idea with his hands. “If there was anything to it, we would’ve found out by now… You probably haven’t heard from Tom because he’s helping me with this other operation. I’ll ask him to get back to you—you don’t have to get Hank involved.” That decided, Eric settles back in his chair, a big smile on his face as he thinks about this other operation. “It has a lot of potential,” he says, leaning back into the creaking chair. “Could be really big. I probably shouldn’t talk about it, but… You heard about when COS Kiev was killed, right?”

“It was before my time, but yeah.”

Eric swells with self-satisfaction. “Well, I think we’re finally going to be able to bring the man behind the hit, Evgeni Morozov, to justice. That’s a big deal to the seventh floor, you know. Something they’ve wanted for a long time.”

“Aren’t you a little bit daunted, to have to juggle so many potentially cataclysmic things?”

He chuckles. “No—it comes with being Chief of the Division. I guess I’ve gotten used to it. Life would be dull without it.”

She’s heard this about Eric, that he likes being the man on the flying trapeze. That he was this way before he moved up in management. Addicted to risk. There’s a sign hanging above his desk in the office, like something a motivational speaker would say: no risk, no reward.

“I think you’re on the right track here, Lyndsey. It feels—right.”

“I wish it weren’t. You’re not going to talk to anyone about this until I’ve had the chance to do more work, right?” Lyndsey isn’t comfortable. There’s something about Theresa’s motives that seems incomplete, despite what Eric says. She wishes she felt more comfortable with what she’s just done, admitting her suspicions about Theresa. Eric is technically responsible for this investigation. He has a right to be informed. And yet—as she walks out of his office—something doesn’t feel right.

Lyndsey turns over her conversation with Eric as she drives home, still sick to her stomach for having voiced her suspicions about Theresa out loud.

Theresa has suffered. It doesn’t feel right to have these suspicions about her. And now she’s told Eric. She wants to trust him. She should trust him. He doesn’t seem like others she’d known, eager to make a name for themselves and not caring who gets hurt in the process. Like the Chief of Station she’d worked for in Lebanon, or the managers in the Clandestine Service who sent her to Beirut hoping for the worst. She’d questioned it at the time—she was doing well with the Russian target, why move her to something different?—but she was told she needed to prove herself on unfamiliar ground. A real superstar will rise to the occasion, Chief of Station Beirut had told her with a glint in his eyes that she chose to ignore. She wanted to believe all the honey they poured in her ear.

Beirut. As it turned out, her enemies didn’t have to lift a finger. She gave them all the ammo they needed to shoot her down.

Davis was the opposite of the men she’d tended toward in nearly every way: older, cynical, and worldly. She’d had no intention of getting serious with him. She had played it chaste in Moscow, not wanting to get a reputation, not with Reese looking over her shoulder, and besides, running Popov had kept her busy. As far as the Station knew when she arrived in Lebanon, she was a single woman. She was ready to have fun.

She figured wrong.

She had played into the hands of the people who wanted to see her fail. Not that she’d had a real nemesis. There was no one specific person out for her blood. No, the Clandestine Service brought her down for sport but also on principle: there would always be someone waiting to see you fall for no other reason than they thought you had succeeded too easily. And hadn’t she gone and proved they were right? A smart woman wouldn’t have taken up with Davis Ranford.

As Lyndsey walks up the steps to her apartment door, she wonders what Davis is doing at that very moment, wishes she could talk to him. He might not still be in Beirut: he might’ve been sent home, too. Consequences all around. She’d been kicked out of the country so fast that they’d had no chance to talk, and now it was wisest not to try to communicate. In the moment, she misses him fiercely.

It’s not until she’s kicked off her shoes that she thinks to check her phone and there it is: a little flag next to the pink secure messaging icon. From Masha. Lyndsey clicks it open hurriedly.

I think we are being followed. We need your help.

Can she be sure it’s the FSB, Lyndsey wonders, then corrects herself. Of course, Masha would know: she grew up under the old Soviet regime, and her husband worked for internal security for decades.

Masha and her daughter are in danger. If they get pulled into the FSB’s net, being the wife and daughter of a traitor, who knows what might happen to them?

If it’s Theresa who’s put their lives at risk, all for some petty form of revenge… Lyndsey will never forgive her.

Go to your sister’s dacha. Watch this app. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.

Lyndsey presses Send. She hopes it’s a promise she can keep.