Red Widow

FIVE

Lyndsey has just returned from the vending machine in the hall—vending machine coffee has to be better than the tree pitch in the office’s coffeemaker—when Maggie stops by her desk.

“There’s someone in the conference room to see you. From CI.”

Counterintelligence. It’s not the worst news: if it had to do with Lebanon, they’d have sent someone from the Office of Security. The men in Security are humorless, unsmiling and unblinking. After the events of the past month, the accusations and threats, she’s had enough of Security to last her a good long while, thank you.

There is something unexciting about the man she finds in the small conference room. Counterintelligence are the people who look for in-house spies. In many ways, it’s a small world unto itself, chasing leads that rarely pan out. A dull job for dull, suspicious people. As opposed to the Clandestine Service, her service. The glamourous work, the stuff of legends.

“Raymond Murphy,” the man says as he rises to shake her hand. His dishwater-colored eyes give her a once-over. She studies his face in return. Wary. Something he’s trying to hide, that he doesn’t want me to see. He’s the kind of man who mows the lawn every Saturday morning whether it needs it or not, shines his shoes every Sunday, always buys the same brand of cereal. “I’ve been assigned to work with you on the task force.”

It makes sense that Eric would get someone from CI to assist on this. They have access to information that she wouldn’t, from financial disclosure statements to background checks. And computer logs. Still, she can’t help but feel slightly uncomfortable, as though he’s looking over her shoulder, too. All Agency people feel that way about them, she figures. They’re like internal affairs in a police department.

“I’ve been told that you’re just back from overseas, getting your feet on the ground,” he continues. How much has he been told about her specific situation, she wonders, before admonishing herself to STOP THINKING ABOUT THE THING that hangs over her head like the Sword of Damocles. Her lapse of judgment. Her relationship with a foreign national, an agent of another intelligence service to boot. Davis Ranford, a British citizen… and a member of a rival service. The rules are there for a reason, Chief of Station Beirut had said when he sent her back to D.C.

Rules that others have broken and gone unpunished, but who does the breaking is as important as which rule was broken.

Murphy gives no indication that he’s aware of the debate raging in her head. He swivels his chair lazily. “I thought maybe we could start with some background, get you set up. Have you ever been involved in an investigation like this before?” He leans back, but she senses he’s not as relaxed as he’d like her to think. “This is probably an insider threat. We like to say Counterintelligence is like an iceberg. The part we can see is probably less than ten percent of what’s really going on. You usually don’t have a clue until something like this happens.”

He means a double agent. Someone on your team selling secrets to the enemy. It’s not entirely a surprise to Lyndsey. The Agency teaches its employees about treason. They sit in classes devoted to the case histories of famous traitors: Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames, Ana Montes. They are made to learn the particulars of their treachery. They are taught the warning signs—unexplained wealth, sudden and unaccountable foreign travel, spurts of sudden chumminess alternating with prickly distance—so they’ll know when to be suspicious if they see these signs in a coworker. So you’ll be able to tell when the person sitting beside you might be selling secrets to foreign masters.

And yet it seems surreal to Lyndsey. Impossible. The kind of thing that never happens in real life. That only happens in movies.

“It’s more common than we think,” Raymond says, as though reading her mind. “You should know that going in. We’re going to have to look hard at some of your colleagues and it’s going to feel uncomfortable. You’re not going to want to believe what you’re seeing.” His dishwater-brown eyes don’t seem so vague now. “Chances are good that someone inside this building has committed treason. Maybe even someone you know.”

She already feels funny. She doesn’t want to judge her coworkers; she knows what it’s like to be judged. “Isn’t it possible that it isn’t someone on the inside? Couldn’t the Russians have found out on their own?”

He smiles like he feels sorry for her, clinging to a fairy tale. “Well, sure, there’s always a possibility. And if that is what happened, it’ll be your job to prove it. But it’s far more likely that it was someone inside. Someone who knew these guys were working for us.”

“But it could be Moscow Station. Could you look into the people there, see if there are any possibilities…” See if there are any weak links, she means but cannot say. Disciplinary cases, case officers who’ve fallen behind in child support or started drinking.

“That’s a good division of effort. I’ll look at the Station and you cover Russia Division. I’d like you to start by finding out which officers in Russia Division were working on those cases. Kulakov, Nesterov, and Popov. Check their reactions, how they’re taking it, see if any of them act defensive. You pass those names on to me. I have access to their files, so I can check out their stories, look for unusual activity.” That means financial disclosure forms, security paperwork, requests for unofficial foreign travel. A CIA officer’s personal life is well documented. It’s hard to keep secrets from Uncle Sam.

“We should check the access lists, too,” Raymond continues. “Who knew these guys’ true identities in the first place? See how many people we’re talking about. We’ve already started the paperwork to get you approved for the compartments. Get in touch with your Security office.”

“Okay.” And again, she sees something funny in his expression. A razor-thin but shell-hard veneer. Suspicion.

He can’t seriously think she had anything to do with this. That’s the thing about dealing with CI: they have a way of making you worry even though there’s nothing to find.

It’s not Davis Ranford. Raymond Murphy might know about Beirut—let’s face it, he probably knows—but she suspects it’s something else, something that’s been around longer. Maybe he’s heard the stories about her, stories that will haunt her for the rest of her career.

Because Popov had been a legendary Russian spymaster and she had been his first handler, and they had been close. Lyndsey had gotten the old SVR spymaster to give up more on the Russian spy machine than anyone else in CIA’s history. With that success came suspicion. How had a young officer on her first big assignment been able to succeed where no one else had? Was it because she was merely lucky, or had there been some quid pro quo, some double-dealing? There were some—officers with many years of service with nowhere near the same success—who were sure something bad had gone down, that Lyndsey could not have been that good or that lucky. Men who were as sure of it as they were of anything.

They had investigated—and found nothing. Because there was nothing to find.

They can’t seriously think she has been working for Moscow all this time. That she and Popov fed Langley a string of lies to establish her bona fides, to make her look like a wunderkind. In their twisted logic, Popov’s death would make sense: Moscow could’ve killed him to protect her story, if he was the only one who knew the truth…

Now there’s Lebanon. Actual proof that she is a bad egg.

Anxiety blooms in her chest like heartburn. She knows there is no link between Yaromir Popov and what happened in Beirut, just as she knows they will look, because that is what the job calls for, chasing ghosts. Hoping to catch something that you can’t see.

This eternal suspicion, which some would call vigilance.

How sad to always be suspicious, she thinks as she looks at Raymond. To never be able to trust anyone you work with, not one hundred percent. What that must do to a person over time, filled with mistrust as corrosive as acid. Stay in the job too long and one day, you’re hiring a private investigator to follow your spouse and having the kids microchipped and installing keylogging software on their computers.

How much does he know about Davis Ranford, about what she did? Everything, probably. No, not everything. He can’t know her feelings. He may know that she and Davis often met at a bar on Armenia Street, even though they avoided nightclubs and going out in general because the threat of being seen together—he was MI6—was too great. But sitting on a restaurant terrace on a Wednesday night to watch the last streaks of light evaporate from the sky seemed safe enough.

She couldn’t date anyone in the Station. It didn’t take a week after she’d arrived to know there was something off about Beirut Station, a toxic boys’ club led by a sadistic Chief of Station. She’d known when she agreed to the assignment that going from the Russia target to the Middle East would be what they liked to call a “challenge,” needing to prove herself all over again to people who’d just as soon not have the competition. She just didn’t know how bad a decision it had been until she walked through the door. That the old guard in the Clandestine Service clearly had it in for her.

She couldn’t be friends with coworkers: she couldn’t trust them, that was clear. She’d reconciled herself to a lonely two-year tour when she met Davis at an embassy function. She sensed right away that he was also an outcast, even if she couldn’t tell what personal failing or mortal sin had made him so. Why his colleagues at the British embassy ostracized him—except maybe jealousy, but she was partial to him. She liked his dry wit.

So many evenings spent on the terrace of the bar on Armenia Street, neither of them saying a word to each other. They’d done a few touristy things—visited the Cedars of God in Kadisha Valley, explored the Jeita Grotto—but more often than not, if they went out in public, they ended up at this terrace bar, sipping gin and listening to bickering rise up from the street below. Davis was in his mid-forties and she’d never dated someone that much older, but it only seemed to amuse him. “It’ll be a huge boost to your ego, you’ll see,” he said with a smile. “You’re so much quicker and nimbler than I am, and know everything that’s popular—books, movies, celebrities—while I will know absolutely nothing. Before long you’ll be wondering what you ever saw in me.”

It wouldn’t last forever, she knew, but she had been in no rush to end it. She liked that he never stumbled by mentioning their world outside of Beirut: saying that she’d have to visit when he went back on home leave, or offering to join her in America at Christmas. Their two worlds had to remain separate. It was why they didn’t venture outside one or the other’s apartment on the weekend: too great a risk of being seen together. Officers from different intelligence services should not date one another.

“I don’t see the harm. You’re British,” she’d said once. “You’re practically American.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” He’d made a face. “Don’t believe that ‘cousins’ talk people like to toss around. MI6 is well aware that Langley hates us, and you’ll find your lovely ass in serious trouble if they find out.”

Davis was the only thing that made Beirut bearable. He was always honest with her, perhaps the only one in the entire strange city. He’d been in MI6 for over twenty years and had come by his jadedness honestly. “I’m in it for the travel. I’m afraid England’s not big enough for me and my family and my ex.”

Sitting in this stuffy room with Murphy, she can still picture Davis on the terrace of the bar, the warm night breeze riffling his hair. Can hear the sounds wafting up from the street below, the honking of taxis and occasional catcall from a shopkeeper, as they sit side by side without speaking, wholly given over to the sultry languor. One time she’d complained about Lebanon, some trifling thing she could no longer remember, telling him she preferred Moscow.

His glance was kind but not apologetic. “Moscow will always be your first love because it was your first assignment. Fret not, you’ll go back one day.” Then he said the words that echoed in her head to this day. “In the meantime, though, you must learn to love the one you’re with.” Is that what she was to him? Nothing more than an opportunity to him, a convenience? She never asked. She would’ve stayed in Beirut, toxic office and all, if she’d been able to stay with Davis.

Lyndsey snaps back to the moment, breaking the pleasant trance she let herself fall into. There is no loving this assignment, possibly the worst possible job of all the difficult, unpleasant jobs at Langley. But she will do it for Yaromir Popov, because he is dead and she owes him.

It is then she realizes her mistake. Raymond Murphy is not a dull man trapped in a dull job. That is a façade he has built to lull her into complacency, so she will let down her guard. He wants to ask her about Popov (and probably Davis, too), she can feel it, but he can’t. That’s not how you do the job, running headfirst at it. They are to work together on the disappearance of the Russian assets, yes, but she will be Raymond’s target, too. He will watch her as closely as everyone else.

She can’t afford to forget that.