Red Widow

TWENTY-NINE

Lyndsey sits in a cocoon of darkness.

It’s completely still in the office. So quiet, you can hear the tick of the minute hand on the big office clock. She didn’t go home after dinner but went back to work. Maybe she’s not as hard as she’d like to think. The evening with Theresa has shaken her. She can’t help but worry that she’s wrong, that she’s made a mistake. Was Theresa acting guilty? In the moment, she’d wanted to believe that, but now… She’s not so sure.

According to the FBI transcript, the Russians will make contact with Theresa shortly. If Lyndsey’s missed anything, she needs to know.

She pores over her notes one more time, looking for some overlooked tidbit that will exonerate the accused. Lyndsey wants to be wrong about Theresa. It would be a relief to be wrong. And there are so many pieces to this puzzle that it’s entirely possible that she could’ve missed or misunderstood something. It’s her duty to double- and triple-check.

She’s not wrong. There is the serial number of Theresa’s computer trying to access the restricted files for Lighthouse, Skipjack, and Genghis.

Though the way she tried to access Genghis’s file looks a little different.

Check. We’ve identified this already. One of the reports officers confirmed that Theresa chatted her up.

Still, something niggles at Lyndsey. She bats it away.

There’s nothing to debate. She’s been caught dead to rights. Surveillance has Theresa being contacted by a suspected Russian agent. We’ll catch her red-handed and it’ll be all over. It’s almost over.

She’s a traitor.

Lyndsey flicks a page of an old report, a paper copy. Her eyes are tired. She debates calling it a night.

Her eye falls on a cover term, Razorbill. It’s the first time she’s seen it. The memo seems to refer to some horrible op that ended in disaster, ended so badly that it’s been hidden under a complete blackout of secrecy. She’s pretty sure this is the cover term that’s been redacted on a few of the reports she’s seen associated with Richard Warner’s disastrous mission. They’ve been very careful to keep this one out of the records but here it is slipped out. Fat black ink covers up the most tantalizing pieces of text.

She flips to the front of the folder. theresa warner, it reads in block letters. Why is this report in Theresa’s file?

Razorbill has something to do with Theresa. She sits back, her thoughts starting to race. It’s only right that Lyndsey knows what it is. The woman’s future depends on it.

Why wasn’t she told about the compartment earlier? It’s not out of the realm of possibility that it’s so obscure and so restricted that the very few people who were involved have forgotten about it or moved on and would certainly not know of Lyndsey’s task. She’s not ready to ascribe ill intent on anyone’s part—yet.

Tomorrow, she can contact Raymond Murphy and set him to run this down. Find out what Razorbill is, get her access if it’s warranted.

But… things don’t always move quickly in this bureaucracy. Sometimes it feels like the more people who get involved, the worse it is. The Russians could make contact with Theresa at any minute and they have no idea what form this contact will take, or what might happen. If things bog down, it might be too late. Razorbill might be nothing, and it’d be a disaster to pull the plug at this late date. It certainly would upset some people, sour senior management. Do you know what you’re doing or don’t you?

She needs someone very high in management to grant her immediate access to the compartment. Her gaze drifts down to the chat window tucked in the corner of her monitor. It’s nearly empty, just the names of one or two of her die-hard friends still burning the midnight oil.

But there’s one particular name with a blinking green square next to it. Patrick Pfeifer. Patrick is very high up now, the Director’s Chief of Staff. He had been interested in her research when she was first hired—just doing his job, maybe, encouraging new hires, but they’d stayed in touch over the years. A word of congratulations when she’d gotten the Moscow posting, that sort of thing. He seems like a nice guy, one of the good ones—or is she being naïve?

She hesitates again. If she’s wrong, or wrong to ask this man so directly, at this hour, she could burn this bridge forever.

She clicks on Pfeifer’s name. A little window pops up. Good evening, Patrick, she types.

Before she can finish, a response pops up. You’re working late tonight, Lyndsey. What can I do for you?

Now she doesn’t hesitate. I need your help.

Five minutes later, she’s sitting in Pfeifer’s office.

In some ways, he looks much like the man she met over a decade ago in the alumni center at Penn, asking questions about her studies. His hair at the time was the palest blond she’d ever seen and so she can’t even tell if he’s starting to go white. There are unmistakably more lines on his face, particularly around his eyes. He’s tall, though the desk and chair swallow most of that height.

She’s never been to this office before, let alone at a few minutes to midnight. It’s nice, as befits the number-three man at the Agency, but not as luxurious as Lyndsey would’ve thought. The furniture all looks a little old, like it’s been here through several changes of administration. Pfeifer looks worn, too, though the dimness helps to hide that. The lights are low in deference to overworked eyes. His smile is tired and his shoulders slump. But he doesn’t seem annoyed in the least to be bothered at this hour.

He listens to her without interrupting, though as she speaks, she becomes aware of how many holes there are in her story. Her heart sinks as she explains, but her mind races: what was I thinking? I’m making a fool of myself.

When Lyndsey stops speaking, Pfeifer remains silent. He leans back in his chair, steepling his fingers. “I knew Richard Warner, you know. Good man. I don’t know all the particulars of his case… and I don’t think I was read into Razorbill, or I’ve forgotten if I ever was…” It’s understandable; there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of compartments and the top men theoretically have access to all of them. Finally, he shakes his head once as though chasing the thought away. “Theresa Warner… The Agency didn’t do everything it could’ve for her. I want to make sure we’re right here. If there’s even the slightest chance we could be mistaken…”

He picks up the phone and punches a few buttons. “Hello—who’s on the floor tonight? Put her through.” He must be calling the Watch, the round-the-clock center that runs things when the day shift has gone home. The Agency in miniature. Theoretically, it has the power to do anything that could be done by the regular shift, call in the Director if necessary.

“Oh hi, Rosalind. This is Pat. I need you to give Lyndsey Duncan immediate access to everything you have on Razorbill. Can you do that? Thanks.” He hangs up. The expression on his face hasn’t changed but he’s just done something remarkable: he’s done in five seconds what could’ve taken days of phone calls and waiting. “Go down to the vault: they should have the file pulled and ready for you. If not, let me know. I’ll be here another hour, at least.”

Lyndsey has never liked heading down to the vault.

She’s only had to do it a couple times in her career, make the long, twisting trek in the basement to the giant room that holds all the special files. It reminds her of police evidence lockers, which she has only seen on television. But the feeling is the same: a lonely room full of important but forgotten things. A lone figure sitting in the cage like a prisoner, like he’s done something wrong and this is his punishment.

She only knows one of the men who man the vault on a twenty-four-hours-a-day basis. Jim Purvis, one of the real old-timers. She thinks it’s a little criminal to let someone work at that age, but she’s heard a story about Jim, so odd that it can’t be true, that he actually threatened to go public with secrets—spill his guts online, post them on Facebook or Twitter, anywhere he could—if they didn’t give him a job. He hated being away from this world so much that he couldn’t stand it, couldn’t function outside. Luckily, Jim is not on duty this night. Tonight, it’s a bored-looking younger man with a goatee, reading a paperback science fiction novel. As Pfeifer predicted, the file is waiting for her.

Behind the closed door of her office, Lyndsey looks at this thing that was so hard to get. Made of pale green heavy-duty card stock banded with red on the cover. top secret, it reads, and handwritten underneath, Razorbill. The file is thin, holding only a few reports.

The paper smells musty. She looks at the list of records, only about five in all. The first one seems to be notes taken at a closed-door meeting. Judging from the short list of attendees—the Director and Deputy of the Clandestine Service, head of Human Resources, and a few names she doesn’t recognize—it had to be about something pretty serious.

A creeping sense of foreboding comes over Lyndsey as she rereads that opening. An unauthorized operation on Russian soil? This is against all the rules. First, it’s unthinkable for the chief of a division back here in Langley to okay a mission in another country without bringing the Chief of Station in on it. It’s a sacred rule of the Clandestine Service. This alone would make the director and his deputy furious. How did Eric manage to hang on to his job?

She continues reading, her pulse accelerating with every word. This is about Richard Warner, what really happened when he went to Moscow to try to rescue his asset. What she reads doesn’t track with the stories Theresa and Eric have told her.

Time was of the essence, Eric is quoted in the transcript as saying. Olga Boykova was still at large but the police and the FSB were looking for her. It was only a matter of time before she was caught.

The logical choice would have been for the Station to send someone to meet her and hide her in a safe house until they could smuggle her out of the country, but that didn’t happen—whether it was because Warner didn’t trust the Station or knew Boykova would meet with no one besides him, wasn’t clear. The Station was kept in the dark. Which is crazy. Heresy.

This is a huge breach of policy, Newman. This from the head of the Clandestine Service. Lyndsey works the dates backward: it would’ve been Roger Barker, of the legendary temper. You can be terminated for this.

In the stories she’s heard Eric tell, the exfiltration was both their idea, his and Richard’s. But according to the transcript Eric says, Richard insisted. We were peers, I didn’t feel I could override him. Boykova was his biggest case. His star asset. I felt it was Richard’s call. I didn’t think I could take this away from him. He said he would take the blame if things went wrong.

The transcript doesn’t track with the legend. Of course, the transcript contains only Eric’s side. Maybe, after it blew up in his face, he lost his nerve and put the blame on the man who wasn’t there. It’s easy to imagine the scene, Barker’s face getting redder and redder as he yells and rants.

The transcript gets worse and worse. We put together a team of independent contractors—mercenaries—willing to go to Moscow. Lyndsey had worked with guys who fell in this category, former military and security services who’d served in lawless places like Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan. It’s not clear from the report whether Eric has used these men in previous operations or if they were unknown, but that would be another red flag, another indication of how rushed and desperate Richard and Eric were in throwing this fiasco together.

Too bad we can’t interview them, Barker is recorded as saying. Moscow Station says they’re all dead. It was suicide, and that’s why you didn’t tell anyone else what you were doing.

Boykova had betrayed Putin himself; worked in his house, lived under his roof. In passing secrets to the CIA, she made the FSB look like fools. It doesn’t get any more personal than that. The FSB was not going to let her get away, it would’ve meant their heads, not to mention their balls.

We flew everyone in under cover. They rendezvoused at 2300 local time to go over the extraction plan and then deployed along the route. This is all from Eric.

Richard went in alone to meet Boykova. She was hiding in the boiler room of an apartment building in Tverskaya, hadn’t stuck her head out in three days, likely starving and dehydrated. Richard got her close to the safe house—a street in the neighborhood of Arbat is given—when the Russians closed in. Apparently, they’d been tracking them all along.

How did the Russians find out about the op? the head of Special Operations demands. The transcript shows that Eric has no answer.

It appears to have been a slaughter. Station picked up police chatter about a shootout in the area of the safe house. Seven dead, specifically. One alive. We assume the one still living was Boykova.

That makes sense: they’d want to take her alive, to eventually suffer something painful and drawn out before her eventual death. At this point, there is no word on Richard, but he is presumed dead. If he is lucky, he will have died on the scene.

This is a colossal clusterfuck. Barker again.

Has the ambassador been notified? Westinghouse is an asshole. He’s going to go ballistic. He’ll throw us out of country for sure. Deputy Director of Operations.

Eric is dismissed from the meeting, but the record shows he was spoken of harshly. Barker talks about going to the Director of CIA to demand Eric be fired. He has exceeded his authority. He’s responsible for the loss of one officer and the death of British and American contractors.

But what is he guilty of, exactly, the director of Special Operations asks.

Fucking terrible judgment, the deputy director of Operations says.

He didn’t order Richard Warner to go on this suicide mission. Warner asked for it. And if a few mercenaries get killed, what of it? That’s why we hire them, because they’re expendable and because no one will hear about it.

The transcript ends inconclusively.

Hands trembling, Lyndsey turns to the next one. It’s a cable from Moscow Station, two days later, sent in a special channel that’s for the Director, CIA. She can see that it was later turned around to a handful of seniors in what is now the Razorbill compartment.

She runs a finger under each line as she reads, reading it a second time to be sure. The report starts out by saying Ambassador Westinghouse is furious with the Station. There is radio silence from the Russian foreign ministry. It’s like being in the eye of a storm. They know that something may happen at any moment, but they don’t know what. All operations have been placed on lockdown in the meanwhile, sure that the Russians will use any excuse to roll up their officers.

But in the meanwhile, the Station comes in with a bombshell: Carousel, a reliable asset, has reported that the FSB is holding an American spy, a CIA officer. He was captured in a firefight, trying to smuggle a traitor out of the country.

Richard Warner. They have no name, but who else could it be?

Station reports that they are trying to corroborate the asset’s story as well as obtain additional information, but their assets have scurried for cover, afraid to pop their heads up from the foxholes, afraid the FSB is waiting for them. There is nothing to do but sit and wait. Someone has hand-scribbled in a corner of the page, Russian demands?

Lyndsey leans back in her chair. Her chest is tight, her head swirling. She realizes she has been holding her breath.

Richard Warner was alive. At one point, anyway.

Funny. She notices a small red smudge on the upper-right-hand side of the page. Blood? No, too bright for that. Strange.

But she dismisses it. This isn’t the last report, after all. There are a few sheets of paper to go. Taking a deep breath, she starts the last one.

Another memorandum for the record recording another meeting. Two flimsy sheets of paper. This is where they find out Richard is dead, Lyndsey reckons. This is where they learn he was killed by the FSB, dying in a Russian prison hospital, and that the vindictive Russians refuse to return the body.

Except it’s not.

For a formal memorandum, the words are hot and visceral and jump off the page. The meeting starts in outrage, but at least Eric has managed to hold on to his position, if only by his fingertips. He tells the assembled group of furious, fuming Agency seniors that the Russians have refused to acknowledge that anything ever happened, their silence deafening. Moscow Station has speculated it’s because Putin cannot have the truth get out, that one of his housekeepers had the temerity to spy on him, to ferry secrets out from under his nose. It would embolden a whole class of Russians—the serfs—to rise up against the oligarchs. It would be the start of the French Revolution on the banks of the Moskva River.

The FSB has made no demands? No offer to trade Richard Warner for one of their traitors? Not even for Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen, their most successful recruits? CIA seniors are clearly flummoxed.

And, surely, they mean a trade for Richard Warner’s body. The man is dead.

The language is clear: there’s no reference to Richard in the past tense. The understanding is that the man is alive.

What can we do? Barker asks. We can’t leave him to rot in a Russian prison. We owe Richard more than that.

Richard didn’t go through proper channels, the Deputy Director says. He knew the risk he was taking. He didn’t expect to be bailed out if things got out of hand.

There’s nothing we can do, Moscow Chief of Station weighs in. The Russians refuse to even acknowledge anything happened. They will deny that they have Richard Warner, and if we press the point, we risk exposing CAROUSEL. I’m not going to lose this asset—we’ve lost enough of them because of this fiasco.

Fiasco. The word must’ve dripped like acid onto Eric’s skin. He was already in water hot enough to boil him alive. All his years on the Russia target, his reputation, going up in smoke.

Risk big or go home—wasn’t that always Eric’s motto?

But not Richard’s. Yes, there’s something here that niggles at Lyndsey, like a buzzing gnat.

Finally, the Director weighs in. Our hands are tied. There’s nothing we can do for Richard, poor bastard. Maybe the Russians will change their mind one day. For now, we let it go. Seal the records.

No one speaks up, according to the report.

And Theresa? The Deputy Director asks the question.

Tell her nothing. Let her think that her husband is dead.

Who could be so heartless to keep this from Theresa? Lyndsey wonders. That director, the political appointee, the one before Chesterfield? Some outsider, oblivious to the Agency’s obligation to its people.

It’s right there on the page, who said it.

Eric Newman.

Eric Newman told them to keep this information from her.

It went on: We don’t know that we’ll ever get him back. Let her get on with her life. There’s no reason for her to suffer for his mistake. Isn’t it better for her this way?

No one objects. Not the Director, not the Deputy Director. No one speaks up for Theresa.

I swear she’ll never know, Eric goes on. It remains on the seventh floor. We’ll be the only ones to know.

And it’s done.

Lyndsey pushes away from her desk, her heart pounding in her chest like she’s just run a marathon at a sprinter’s pace.

This is unbelievable—and yet it is completely plausible. In the clandestine service, you hear rumors of assets captured by foreign security services and left to rot in jail for years and years. It’s the risk they all acknowledge and accept.

But it only happens to assets, foreigners who decide to give away their country’s secrets. This doesn’t happen to CIA officers. There are always secret negotiations, trades for an adversary’s agent languishing in a U.S. prison. Right? That’s what the Clandestine Service would have its new hires believe.

Two years in a Russian prison. Lyndsey can only imagine what it must be like for Richard.

And Theresa… They decided she would never be told. Eric made the suggestion, the men in suits backed him up. Left his friend to rot in a Russian prison, to be tortured, maybe even killed, and leave the wife thinking he was gone forever. And all the stories Eric’s told, over and over, making him look like the good guy, the hero who fought for her… Lyndsey feels a stab in her chest like a cold dagger plunged deep.

There is no indication that Theresa ever found out the truth, but if she did…

There is her motivation for working with Russia. To get back at CIA for their betrayal.

Lyndsey’s stomach drops, like being pushed off a cliff.

This is a tangled, tangled web of deceit. And at the heart of it, The Widow, bruised and battered.