Red Widow

THIRTY-EIGHT

Tarasenko finds himself back in the city he hates most.

He takes an Uber from National airport to his hotel. Settled into the back seat of the Honda Accord (very clean by Russian standards, and the driver even offered him a bottle of water), he watches the cityscape roll by. George Washington Parkway, past exits for the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery, and now plunged into woods as dark and lonely as any Russian folktale. And he’s heard just as many stories about the parks of Washington as he has about the woods outside Moscow. Who knows what goes on in these woods at night? Murders, drug deals, assaults… It is not what it pretends to be—to the world, to itself.

The main reason he doesn’t like D.C. is that it tries too hard to be liked. So many pretty monuments, too many trendy shops. Too many expensive, fancy cars on the roads. It’s all too neat, too clean for his tastes. The capital of a great power should be like a heavyweight prizefighter, in his opinion. Washington lacks the spine of steel that a true superpower needs to let other countries know that it’s not fucking around. It should inspire fear. Washington, D.C., lost its spine a few presidents back and it’s only gotten worse with time. Now it’s overrun with lobbyists and lawyers telling the government what to do, corporations backing politicians like it’s a horse race. They may be in it for the money in Moscow, too, but no one forgets who is in charge. It’s not a crazy land grab, everyone out to get what they can. Under the Hard Man, there is harmony. He keeps everyone in line.

In the Uber, he keeps an eye out for an FBI tail but he’s pretty sure he’s clean. He’s traveling under a new identity and it looks like they haven’t picked up on it yet. More proof that Washington isn’t the superpower it once was. There was a time when the FBI would be on them from the second they got off the plane. In Beijing, you have to worry about facial recognition everywhere you go. Again, a superpower that doesn’t fuck around. Younger Russian intelligence officers prefer to be posted to Singapore and Hong Kong and mainland China for the challenge. The technology in these places keeps you on your toes. Keeps you from getting complacent. It’s no fun when your adversary doesn’t give a fuck.

As he drinks that evening in the hotel bar, he is overcome with an ill-advised recklessness, a child whose parents have gone out for the first time without getting a babysitter. Should he stick a fork in an electrical outlet, leap from the roof of the garage into the bushes, play pranks on the neighbors? He orders up a rental car—no Uber for what he’s about to do—and drives out to northern Virginia, to the neighborhood where Kanareyka lives. He loops through the dark streets for over an hour just in case there is a tail following him, then parks within easy view of the gray-and-white house, lights a cigarette, and watches.

The Rezidentura has been circumspect about bugging the house of a CIA officer. For most assets, it would be a given, the price of doing business. They would sneak in under the guise of an electrician or other serviceman and place recording devices in the house. But the housekeeper doesn’t let anyone in when Kanareyka is away, and they know better than to try this with Kanareyka herself. The Rezidentura has to make do with men watching her house from fake service vans, risky in a neighborhood of former spies who think nothing of knocking on your window and demanding to see identification or, worse yet, calling the police.

Kanareyka’s Volvo is in the driveway. At one point, he sees Kanareyka through an upstairs window, her angular face in profile, arms crossed over her chest, looking down as though she is talking to someone who is very short. It has to be Kanareyka’s son, the one mentioned in the reports. There is a blue glow cast on Kanareyka’s cheek from a television or computer monitor. Is her son begging for a few more minutes to play his video games, like boys in Russia? Like boys everywhere. They talk for a few more minutes and then the light clicks off and the room goes black.

Everything looks normal, and that is good. Again, in this neighborhood of spies, you don’t want to raise suspicions that the family is about to leave. On the other hand, everything looks too normal, and that makes him nervous. Could Kanareyka be trying to trick them? Maybe she is not planning to flee after all. Maybe she’s going to defy them. He studies the quiet house—no signs of packing, no trash piled on the curb waiting for pickup, nothing out of place—and puffs on his cigarette. What does this utterly placid house tell him about Kanareyka’s state of mind? He needs to know more. After all, he’s the one walking into that house in a day’s time. It’s not too much to want assurances, to know he’s not heading into a trap. He needs to look inside.

Dropping the cigarette butt out the car window, he zips up the front of his dark jacket to cover the light-colored shirt beneath it, which glows like it’s radioactive in the dark. Like the seasoned case officer that he is, Tarasenko walks casually down the street, like he lives there, a homeowner taking in the night air. He doesn’t cross onto her property until he gets to a spot behind a huge tree, hidden completely in shadow. If anyone had been watching, it would’ve looked like he simply disappeared, but no, he is making his way behind the garage to the back of the house, where he can get close to the windows. For a big man, he is surprisingly quiet on his feet. He sidles around the shrubs and close to the window without snapping twigs or rustling old, forgotten leaves.

He finds one where the blinds are not all the way down, and he can use the gap of a few inches to peer in. The room is dark, but he can see through into the next room, where a light is on. It is very still. No television, no radio or stereo. It doesn’t appear that anyone is on the lower level.

He figures out a way to get to the second story. He pulls himself onto the roof over the enclosed patio and then crawls on his belly to the gable that looks over the backyard. There’s a faint glow from one of the windows so he heads toward that. It’s tricky, because the roof here is steep and the ledge under the window is narrow, mere inches. There is nothing to stop him if he should fall. It’s only about fifteen feet to the ground; he wouldn’t injure himself but there’s no way he wouldn’t be heard.

He makes his way cautiously, gripping the trim under the bank of windows to steady himself, then peers around the sill. Theresa left the curtain partly open, perhaps because she is a fan of moonlight, or because a row of tall trees gives her privacy from the neighbors. Tarasenko holds his breath and inches forward, until his face is close to the glass. Carefully, he peers through the gap in the curtains. Kanareyka wouldn’t like it if she found out he’d been spying on her but really, what can spies expect if not surveillance?

There is Kanareyka, her pale skin luminous in the low light. She reminds Tarasenko of a ballerina: elegant and graceful, but also cold and aloof. Not his kind of woman. The room she is in is spare, nearly empty. It’s not a room anyone has been living in, it’s too sad. She is sorting clothing in a cardboard box. Some pieces she drops in a careless pile by her feet, others she puts in a second, smaller box. She moves slowly, deliberating. These are a man’s clothes, Tarasenko figures out. Must be her husband’s. She’s packing clothing for him.

She pauses at one piece, a rather worn and rumpled plaid shirt. It is very American, like something you’d see on a lumberjack in an old drawing. As a case officer, Tarasenko has been schooled in American folklore and history. The stories Americans tell themselves about their country, bedtime stories meant to comfort frightened children. She buries her face in the shirt. He watches for a moment, mesmerized. There is something special about it, her husband’s favorite perhaps, and she hasn’t seen it for years. She wallows in it. He thinks he sees her shoulders heave; is she crying? She has never cried in front of him, though she has had plenty of reason to, and it occurs to him that he had come to assume she did not cry. That something inside her had hardened over the years, because of these bad circumstances. But perhaps she is not completely ruined, yet. Perhaps there is still a vulnerable part deep inside.

They have not told Richard Warner what has happened or what is coming. After hundreds of days in captivity, Richard Warner has given up nothing, not one scrap of information to make it go easier on him, though no one at Langley would blame him if he had. There is no way a man like this will approve of what his wife has done. Morozov had wanted to tell him, because Tarasenko’s boss is a sick fuck. He had come to resent Warner—just as he resents being trapped inside Russia’s borders, CIA as patient as a remorseless mother-in-law—and thought it would be fun to torture him, letting him see that they had gotten forbidden knowledge at his expense. Morozov left it up to Tarasenko, however, and Tarasenko did not see the advantage in tipping his hand. He hated to admit it—he liked to think his operations were airtight—but anything could still happen. Kanareyka could get cold feet, she might be discovered, the Hard Man could catch wind of their plans and put a stop to it. The prospect of the latter, especially, made him nervous, turned his guts to ice water. It was his ass on the line, not Morozov’s, and he had only the wily old general’s word that he would protect him.

Seeing Kanareyka cry shames him. She really does love her husband, to be willing to go to such lengths for him. He thinks of the women in his life and cannot imagine any one of them capable of the same devotion for him. Quite the opposite: they’d applaud his jailers and encourage them to throw away the key. What Kanareyka is doing for her husband takes tremendous courage. He cannot despise her. If anything, he comes to respect her a bit more.

In any case, it looks as if she is proceeding as planned. Satisfied, he scrabbles back the way he came, inching carefully across the roof before dropping down to the covered porch, and then to the ground, stealing back the way he came like the shadow he aspires to be.

There is one more thing he needs to do tonight.

He drives a few miles down the highway, following the bright streetlamps. The address he looked up after getting the name from Kanareyka. He wants to know more about his adversary, this Lyndsey Duncan.

The parking lot outside her apartment building is completely still. It is what the Americans call a garden apartment, the buildings only a couple stories tall with open stairwells connecting them. It’s not so late that there aren’t lights on in some of the windows. He pulls a pair of binoculars out of the bag in the passenger’s seat.

The curtains looking into Lyndsey Duncan’s apartment are half-drawn, enough to afford Tarasenko a glimpse inside. It’s tantalizing, like peeking through a keyhole. A figure moves back and forth in the room and for a long time is nothing more than a shadow. Like watching a ghost.

But then she stops right in front of the divide and he can see her clearly. Tall, lithe, strong. Long legs, which he has always liked on a woman. As a matter of fact, he likes everything about her: her confidence, which he can tell by the way she stands. The intelligent expression on her face. Her reddish hair, which falls over her shoulders. He can picture himself twisting that hair around his fist. He can picture himself doing a lot of things with this woman. A familiar, not-unpleasant longing comes over him. It’s all he can do not to charge up those stairs and force his way into the apartment.

He could act on his impulses now, but that would ruin everything. Better to play the long game. He stows the binoculars and starts the engine, heading back to his hotel.

Kukla. That will be his name for Lyndsey Duncan. Doll.