The Fall of Moscow Station

CHAPTER NINE

Kyra had spent the night in the truck. Without blankets or enough clothes, the cab had gotten cold, the temperature easily in the midforties. She had slept a bit, running the engine every hour so the heater could keep her warm, as much for her own morale as for comfort. The cold could sap the spirit along with physical strength, and she was going to need both for what she hoped was coming next.

The sunrise caught her by surprise. Kyra hadn’t realized that she’d slipped back into oblivion, as her dreams had been nothing more than an extension of her worried thoughts. She checked her watch and realized that almost twelve hours had passed since she’d transmitted her opplan to Langley. They would either approve it or order her home. How she could even get home now, she wasn’t sure. Maybe headquarters would give her a route out of the country. In any case, it was time to go. The question was how.

She dismounted the cab and felt the cool morning air rush over her face. Kyra slung the sat-phone strap over her shoulder, shoved her hands down in her pockets, and began to make her way back to the hill. The temperature was climbing a bit now that the sun was up, still cold enough to be unpleasant but just barely so.

She scrambled up the grassy hillside, slipping often on the dew. It took a bit longer to reach the peak this time because of the damp, wet slide under her feet, but she held on as best she could. Her legs and triceps were burning by the end, and she took a few minutes to rest, sitting on a flat rock, before she assembled the phone, positioned the antenna, and made the call.

An encrypted digital file was waiting for her, and she downloaded the message and transferred it to her smartphone. She took a deep breath, then touched the screen.

“GRANITE, good to hear your voice.” Kyra recognized Barron’s own voice dictating the message. “Message received on all counts. Also, several seniors were very happy to receive the good news that your friend may still be kicking around. Roger your report that all assets and facilities in AOR are compromised. We hoped for better but weren’t surprised. We retasked some birds to watch our safe sites and observed one house being raided by your hosts. Your present location shouldn’t be considered safe and you should evacuate as soon as you possibly can.”

There was a short pause in his message, then he switched gears. “Roger receipt of your proposed opplan. Plan approved. We’re contacting friends in your AOR and arranging for transfer of resources. Will advise soonest once they are in place as to how you can access them… check back every hour after you receive this message. Also, we’re ordering a change to your plan. We have some friends who will join you in-country who will be en route by the time you receive this. Details to follow. Stay safe, good hunting.”

Several seniors were happy to receive the good news? Kyra smiled at that. Barron had told Kathy Cooke that Jon might still be alive. She wondered how the woman had taken the news. The case officer supposed that the deputy DNI had been happy enough to approve the proposed operation.

Friends who will join you in-country? That was a surprise. She couldn’t imagine how Barron could get anyone into Russia under the present circumstances. Maybe the Brits were coming to help? Aussies? She doubted either country would want to risk its own people and assets given what the United States had just suffered.

Kyra shook her head and cleared her mind. Speculating would just be a waste of energy that she needed to conserve. She sat on the rock, staring out at the green valley below her position, and passed the time trying to think about nothing at all.

There was no message waiting for her the first time she called back. The second call an hour later yielded another encrypted recording. Kyra didn’t recognize the voice and the message was far longer than Barron’s first message. She listened to it three times, memorizing the key details. Her task done, she broke down the satellite phone, packed up, and walked down the hill to the Tiguan.

It had taken less than an hour to find all of the supplies she needed in the house except the twine. That had required a trip to a Russian hardware store. She’d managed to fake her way through the purchase without talking and judge more or less correctly the amount of petty cash needed to cover the expenses. Kyra had pulled into the safe-house garage long after dark, the long, winding routes she’d had to take coming and going having added to the time and subtracted from her energy. She drank two cups of the strong Russian coffee, enough to make sure she would stay awake for hours but not enough to make her hands shake. She was going to need some steady hands.

It had taken her an hour to carve up the twenty bars of soap she’d found upstairs in the bathroom closet using the box grater that had been in one of the kitchen cabinets, and she had a large bowlful of green shavings to show for her work. A storage can from the garage and a siphon pump had allowed her to extract three gallons of gasoline from the Tiguan. Had it been warmer, she would have used motor oil instead, as gasoline would have started to evaporate after a few hours and reduced the volatility of the end product; but the Russian cold was her friend in that respect.

Napalm had been one of the simpler incendiaries the Agency had taught her to make. It would be harder to make the fuse than the jellied gasoline, but not overly so. The several gallons of household bleach she’d found in the basement would provide her with all of the potassium chlorate she would need for that and there was no shortage of granulated sugar in the pantry.

She’d worried about building an ignitor until she realized that Lavrov’s men would provide that for her when they came.

Barron wouldn’t be happy with what she was about to do, she was sure, but if Lavrov’s men were coming, then the safe house was lost to the Agency anyway. Its only useful purpose now would be to send a message to the general that neither Kyra nor the Agency intended to go out so quietly.

Kyra fetched a large metal pot from its home under the counter and turned on the stove. She uncapped the first bottle of bleach and began to pour it into the pot.

“Your report, Colonel?” Lavrov leaned back in his chair, using his shoulder to hold the phone to his ear. Russian breweries had not mastered the art of the twist cap and opening a bottle took both of his hands.

“We have completed raids on four of the homes that your source identified,” Sokolov said. “All were abandoned, all sanitized. If they truly were CIA safe houses, the evidence of it was thoroughly removed before the custodians left. Impressive, given how little time they must have had.”

“Indeed,” Lavrov said. “It does not matter, Colonel. I expect they will all be abandoned and stripped except one, and it is that one you must find.” The bottle top finally came loose and the general took his first taste. The brew inside was bitter and not quite as cold as he liked it.

“There are six more on the list you gave me, General,” Sokolov advised. “It takes several hours to plan and conduct a proper raid on each one to make sure no one evades capture. It will take at least another day, possibly two to target them all.”

“Understood. No delays, Colonel.”

“Yes, sir,” Sokolov said.

Kyra set the plastic bucket down and peeled the latex gloves off her hands. The napalm was plastered in every major room of the house. Running the improvised string fuse to each incendiary site was going to take another half hour. Setting up the front, mudroom, and back doors to ignite the entire system would take less than a minute.

An hour later and the job done, Kyra looked to the clock. She still had twelve hours before she had to go out on the street.

The coffee had long since stopped doing its job and Kyra wanted to stumble back up the stairs to the bedroom. She would need some sleep and then some food in her stomach for what came next. But it was not safe to stay, as tempting as the soft bed was. Kyra might easily wake up to find the Spetsnaz standing over her, or, more likely, the house burning around her if the ignition system worked as she’d planned.

She could sleep in the Tiguan after she’d found some hidden field miles from here. Her last chore here was to turn on the shortwave transmitter, tuned to the frequency she’d used to talk to Lavrov last night, and leave it on. Then she would drive out. The Spetsnaz would come—

A telephone rang.

Her mind hazy from lack of sleep, she needed several seconds to realize that it wasn’t any ringtone on her cell. No, it was the house phone. Headquarters? she thought. Langley surely had the number, but Barron wouldn’t be so stupid as to call her on an open, unencrypted line.

She stumbled off in search of a handset, finally finding one on the sixth or seventh ring, having lost count. The caller ID showed nothing.

Answer it? she wondered.

Why not? Jon’s voice in her mind said. You’re heading out the door anyway and not coming back.

She picked it up, then froze in place, realizing too late that she didn’t know how to answer a call in Russian or whether there was any kind of security phrase assigned to this location.

The caller saved her the embarrassment. “You are American?” the man asked. His voice was disguised, digitized somehow.

Kyra said nothing. “You must leave house if you are American,” the voice said, the man’s English accented and broken. “They are coming to your safe site. You have maybe one hour, maybe more, but they come and they arrest you. You must leave now.”

She heard a click on the other end, then a dial tone, and she stared at the phone in her hand. Kyra set it back in the cradle.

It had not been some mistaken caller dialing the wrong number. The man had expected that an American would answer, which meant he’d known that he was calling a safe house. That, together with the fact that he had been able to get the telephone number, which was unlisted, yelled that the caller was someone who had access to official information.

But he’d spoken quickly, not waiting for a response from her, but simply had spilled what he knew and cut the call. Worried that someone might hear him? she wondered. Then she understood. The caller hadn’t merely been someone with access to official information. No, counterintelligence information.

There was a mole in Lavrov’s operation. Someone knew about Lavrov’s operations against the Agency.

Someone Maines didn’t give up? Someone he didn’t know about? she wondered. Or maybe just someone Lavrov hadn’t arrested yet, but that seemed unlikely. If there was anyone in a position to know about his counterintelligence operation, Lavrov would have been a fool not to neutralize that traitor first. No, there was someone in the Kremlin, maybe the GRU, who was moving against Lavrov and who wasn’t on whatever list Maines had given up.

Kyra checked the caller ID again and cursed the empty display. The caller might have been someone who could help her find out what had happened to Jon. The ID might have given her somewhere to start, some bit of information she could have used to reconnect with the Russian caller, whoever he was.

The quiet of the house seemed hostile to her now, the shadows of the hallway oppressive. Maybe one hour, she repeated in her mind.

The adrenaline surge cleared her mind and her vision. She ran across the hallway to the equipment room, threw the door open, grabbed for the satellite phone, and began stabbing at the keypad. The call connected, encrypted, and she heard an American accent for the first time in days.

“Operator.”

“This is site GRANITE,” Kyra announced. “I have reason to believe this location will be raided within the hour. All remaining equipment and papers will be sanitized and I am evacuating.”

“Roger, copy that,” the male voice on the other end said. “To which other site will you evac?”

Kyra sucked in a deep breath. “None of them. All sites in this area have been compromised.”

The man on the other end was professional enough to keep his thoughts to himself about that. “Copy that, all sites in your immediate area compromised. Are you requesting evac from the country?”

“Negative. I’m heading for the embassy.”

“Copy that, good luck and stay safe.” The operator disconnected the call.

Kyra pulled the crypto card from the phone and stuffed it in her pocket. Breaking down the sat phone and its antenna took her less than a minute. That job done, she sat down in front of the classified computer and launched the program that would wipe the hard drive. The machine made her confirm twice that she really wanted the program to execute. She told it yes both times and the machine obediently began to overwrite every file on the system.

The file-deletion utility reported that it needed ten minutes to chew up all of the encrypted data on the hard drive.

Ten minutes. It had been almost forty-five minutes since the anonymous Russian had called. She looked out the windows toward the main road, saw nothing. Kyra pulled the chair to the window, sat down, and stared out, waiting for the enemy to come. The watch on her wrist showed the seconds passing by more slowly than she had ever thought possible.

The hard-drive utility reported that it had finished its work on time, which Kyra thought was no small miracle. She powered the machine down, pulled the removable hard drive from its chassis, and fed it and the sat phone’s crypto card into the industrial shredder in the storage closet connected to the room. The sounds of grinding metal were, at once, the most hideous and beautiful noise Kyra had ever heard as the shredder turned the drive platters into shavings. The shredder finished dining on the storage device and the card, and Kyra powered it down.

She ran for the garage.

It truly was an enormous house by Russian standards, and if it was a CIA safe house, Anton Semyonovich Sokolov could not fathom why the Americans had chosen it. The gates and fence provided no true security from the security forces, as the Spetsnaz had just proven by climbing the iron spikes, and the relative wealth on display could only draw attention. Perhaps the Agency had expected that to deflect suspicion, a daring move in a mind game that had stretched on for decades. Or, perhaps, some mindless bureaucrat had simply had money to burn. Whatever the logic, Lavrov’s source had rendered it moot and cut through the illusions that had kept the building secure.

The sun was behind the trees and the house itself cast a long shadow that reached to the gate, giving the Spetsnaz a dark trail to follow as they ran across the lawn, carbines raised. There was no obvious movement inside the house itself, which was mostly dark. There was a light visible on the upper floor and one in the kitchen, but the rest of the windows were black. The size of the building itself had required every man at his disposal for the raid and two dozen, four teams, were moving into position to enter the house, the rest positioned on the ground to catch anyone who tried to run.

“All teams in position,” the team leader called out over the radio.

Sokolov frowned. “No response from inside?”

“Nyet, Colonel.”

The GRU officer scanned the compound, then looked through his field glasses at the house itself. The light inside let him see into a room on the upper story, and some secondary illumination cast a glow into one of the front rooms on the main level, but there was no movement anywhere. He pursed his lips. Something was amiss, he was sure, but he could not see it.

“Proceed,” he said, finally giving the order.

At the front, the team leader nodded to the officer heading the stack of four positioned by the door. The lead man nodded, drew back with the heavy sledge in his hands, and slammed the breaching tool forward into the knob. The door shuddered, but held fast. The man pulled back and swung the sledge again, this time battering it against the middle hinge. The door shook again but stayed fixed in place.

“Front door is reinforced,” the team leader reported, speaking into the microphone clipped to his uniform.

“Rear entry is reinforced,” his radio announced. The team behind the house was having no better luck.

“Side entry is reinforced.” A different voice this time, same report.

“Garage door breached, garage entry to the house is reinforced and door is secured with a keypad.”

So it is a safe house, Sokolov told himself. Or the owner is very paranoid. Probably a criminal who should be arrested anyway. He raised his field glasses. Still, there was no movement inside the house.

“All teams, proceed with ballistic breach—”

“This is team four,” Sokolov’s radio announced. “The doorframe of the garage entry is reinforced with heavy metal. Hinges are nonstandard. Ballistic breaching round likely will not penetrate. Permission to perform explosive breach.”

Sokolov’s eyebrows went up. The teams all had specialized breaching rounds that vaporized on impact to protect the shooters and teams from ricochet. “Team four, is solid slug an option?”

“Nyet. The first slug almost certainly would not penetrate, and likely would ricochet. I would prefer not to risk that, given that we are standing in an enclosed space.”

Sokolov’s eyebrows went up at that news. They had not run into this particular problem at any of the other reported safe houses. Those had all had wooden doors, solid oak to be sure, but nothing the men hadn’t been able to breach with sledges or shotguns. The specialized shotgun rounds were preferable, as a solid slug fired point-blank from a twelve-gauge shotgun could overpenetrate a door, blowing through the wood and killing a suspect on the other side. That assumed the door was even composed of wood. Someone willing to install a hardened metal doorframe likely would not use a wooden door. The entry likely was a metal plate covered with wood veneer. His teams were trained to fire two rounds at a knob, three at a hinge, just to be sure the chosen weak point of the door was destroyed. Fired into a metal door, those rounds might go in every direction but into the house itself.

Armored against a ballistic breach? Someone is paranoid indeed, he thought. A metal door suggested that they had found one of the Main Enemy’s primary facilities outside his embassy. “All teams, prepare for explosive breach at your discretion,” he ordered through his own mic.

The team leader in the mudroom pulled a flexible linear charge from his pack. Doing the math in his head, he began to run lines of detonation cord the length of the door, top to bottom by the hinges. One line would have taken apart a hollow door, two would tear apart anything made from particleboard, and three could cut through solid wood. Not knowing how thick the metal core at the door’s center might be, he opted to tape six lines onto the barrier. If that failed, getting through the door would require a specialist to cut through the door with a plasma torch. His team would have to resign itself to guarding the room and preventing any escape while the other teams swept the house.

He ordered his men out of the mudroom, attached the blasting cap, and connected the firing line.

The team leader at the front door nodded to the stack lead and the line of men while he pulled a two-inch-square block of Semtex from his pack. He fastened the putty brick to the doorknob with a loop of detonation cord connected to the explosive with uli knots. Loose ends of detcord hung down and he tied them into a square knot. He tied in the blasting cap and connected his own firing line, then fell back to his own safe position. Then he tied the detcord line into the fuse initiator.

“First team, breaching charge in place. Standing by to breach.” The other teams reported back within seconds, their own charges fixed and ready to fire.

“Go,” Sokolov ordered.

The team leader ripped the cotter pin from the initiator, a hard, sharp pull.

The detcord ignited, followed by the Semtex, and flames and smoke exploded from the door, with simultaneous eruptions coming from the rear and side of the house. The explosion inside the garage was deafening and the team leader out front hoped that his counterpart hadn’t miscalculated the explosive required. Overloaded breaching charges had deafened more than one soldier performing such duties.

The front door slammed open and the stack of soldiers rushed forward, carbines raised. They entered the house, pushing through the gray haze—

The stack leader felt the pressure wave of the igniting gasoline before he smelled it. The room went up in an instant, flames spreading across the floors and walls in every direction. He saw lines of flame travel out of the room into the kitchen, the hallway, the library, faster than he could move.

A large glass jar, sealed with a lid and filled with a colored gelatin, sat in the middle of the room, the flames not quite touching it.

“Fall back!” he ordered. “All teams! Evacuate the building now!”

His stack turned and filed out as fast as they could move. The team leader still on the porch jumped the railing and ran with them across the lawn toward Sokolov’s position.

Inside the front room, the glass jar heated enough to ignite the napalm inside. The makeshift bomb exploded, glass and burning jellied gasoline spreading out to fill the room in a fraction of a second. Identical explosives went off in the kitchen and by the rear and side doors.

The gas trails Kyra had laid down led the open flames to every other room in the house, where the napalm she’d spread across the walls and floors lit off, each starting a small inferno. On the second floor, the gas fumes that had collected since her departure ignited, sending a mild fireball through the upper floor, igniting the napalm puddles and everything else flammable they touched.

With less than a minute, the funeral pyre for Moscow Station was burning against the dusk, smoke rising high enough to be seen from the Kremlin.

A mile away, Kyra lay prone in a copse on a small knoll, looking at the abandoned estate through her own field glasses. The building was nothing more than a house-shaped flame with men in tactical gear standing at a safe distance, helpless to do anything but watch the immolation.

One man was dressed in civilian clothes, a business suit and overcoat, no hat, and speaking into a phone. She could not make out his features from this distance, but his profile was different enough that she could tell that it wasn’t Lavrov. She’d hoped he would be here to see the safe house burn in person, but she was sure that he’d get the message all the same.

She pushed herself up to standing and walked back to the Tiguan. She tossed the field glasses inside, crawled in, started the engine, and drove across the green field between her and the road, not caring if the soldiers in the distance could hear the engine.

The exact moment of the excited phone call had been a surprise, but the call itself was not. Barron entered the bullpen, his eyes immediately drawn to the array of monitors that covered the front wall. At the moment, they were mated together to display a single image, in this case a live video feed from an orbiting satellite controlled by the National Reconnaissance Office.

Barron stopped and smiled when he saw the image. Everyone in the room stared at the head of the Directorate of Operations, unable to fathom why anyone should be happy to watch an Agency facility burn so early in the morning.

The senior duty officer sidled over to his superior. “You seem very chipper for a man who’s watching a very expensive safe house go up in flames.”

“Better torched than in the hands of the GRU,” he said.

Sokolov stepped inside the charred remains of the safe house. Spetsnaz officers in tactical vests and balaclavas were still sweeping the gutted structure, Bison SMG carbines and Makarov pistols raised to eye level. They would be thorough, but Sokolov had no doubt that there was nothing to find. There had been no cars in the garage, no lights, no signs of life, but Lavrov’s information had again proven correct. This had been a CIA safe house. The incendiary traps had erased any doubts he’d had about that.

The sweep took less than ten minutes to complete. “Nothing to recover?” Sokolov asked.

“Nyet” was the answer. The Spetsnaz team leader pulled his black hood back over his head and away from his face. “Any specialized equipment or papers have been destroyed. We found the remains of an industrial shredder on the second level and its wastebin in the cellar next to a furnace. There was one computer in the same area with the shredder, but its hard drive is missing, probably fed into the shredder. Any papers were probably shredded and burned before the house went up. We will recover nothing.”

“They knew we were coming.”

The Spetsnaz leader looked around, thought, and nodded. “They used gasoline as an accelerant, possibly other chemicals as well,” he said. “Our own breaching charges ignited the fires.”

“They tried to kill our teams,” Sokolov noted.

“I don’t think so,” the soldier replied. “The napalm jars were left in plain view where the teams would see them immediately. Whoever arranged this could have set up a very efficient ignition system, but just left them sitting in the middle of the room for the heat to ignite. They were not even covered in accelerant, if our men’s observations are accurate. I think that our arsonist wanted to give our men a chance to get out.” He scanned the ruins. “I have never heard of the CIA rigging a house to burn this way, but I suppose they might have done so in desperation. The general gave them little time to leave the country. They may have hoped to return one day, but left the incendiaries in case that proved impossible.”

Sokolov nodded. “I suspect that you are right. Still, it would be a callous thing. Had we not come, some civilian would have in time and might been killed, delayed napalm bombs notwithstanding.” But if they knew we were coming? That we would be the ones to encounter those homemade explosives? It would not be callous then, would it? He looked around at the remains of the living room, what had been a vaulted ceiling, plush carpet, and leather couches. “It surely was a lovely home. The Americans do like their comforts, do they not?”

“They do, I think,” the soldier agreed.

“Indeed,” Sokolov replied. “Sweep the rubble again. Look for any secret compartments. Tear out any floorboards you find intact. I doubt very much that you will find anything, but we must be thorough. Report to me by nineteen hundred hours tonight. General Lavrov will be expecting an update.” Sokolov frowned, then sighed. “And I must disappoint him.” The soldier nodded, saluted his commanding officer, then moved off to organize the sifting of the ash and char.

He pulled out his own encrypted smartphone and dialed a stored number. “General Lavrov, this is Colonel Sokolov.”

“Your report, Colonel?” Lavrov demanded.

“My teams have all reported in. We have taken control of all of the sites on the list you provided, but found them all abandoned. All but one had sensitive equipment either removed or rendered unusable. There is evidence enough to confirm that they likely were CIA safe houses, but there will be little of use to be recovered from any of them.”

“All but one?”

“The last one. The doors were all reinforced with strong metal and we were forced to breach the doors with explosive charges. There were incendiary traps set at the entrances, which our charges ignited. The house burned.”

“That is where she was hiding,” Lavrov noted.

“Almost certainly,” Sokolov agreed. “But she was not here when we arrived and she has no safe haven now, if your source’s list is complete.”

“I do not think that worries her,” Lavrov replied. “She did not have to burn the house, but chose to do so. That was a message and a dramatic one. She is confident that she can escape our country. Your team’s surveillance of the Western embassies has suffered no lapses?”

“None, General. She has not been observed entering or exiting the U.S. Embassy or that of any close American ally,” Sokolov confirmed. “It is always possible that she could have entered hidden in some vehicle, as we cannot search those. But we have kept a very tight watch on all pedestrians entering on foot.”

“Good. Make sure that they remain under watch. I want her found.”

“We may yet hope there will be some bit of evidence here missed in the initial sweep.”

“Hope is a poor substitute for competence, Colonel, if you understand my meaning,” Lavrov advised.

“I do, General,” Sokolov replied. “I will report to you with our findings by nightfall.”

“I will be waiting.” The call went dead. Sokolov replaced his phone in his pocket. So, young lady, you got out, he thought. Run, little rabbit. I do not think you would like to be Lavrov’s guest.

Joshua Ettleman shifted his laptop bag in his hand, nervous about the contents for several reasons, some of which he would have been hard-pressed to put into words.

Espionage was not something he’d ever aspired to practice, and the newest foreign service officer at the U.S. Embassy was quite disturbed that he’d managed to get roped into an operation four months into his tour, however minor his role. But the order, polite though it was, had come from the ambassador. Why she had chosen him, Ettleman was sure he didn’t know. He’d been quite surprised that his country’s chief diplomat to the Russian Federation had agreed to participate in any operation the CIA had organized and he assumed it had something to do with the mass exodus of U.S. citizens from the country a few days before. He’d heard the scuttlebutt that the Russians had declared a huge swath of his countrymen persona non grata, but the ambassador had locked down the information on orders from Foggy Bottom. Ettleman and the minions who worked at his level were left only with the rumors, but that was plenty. Bureaucratic leaks often turned out to be more accurate than the exalted leadership would have liked and what Ettleman had heard was so strange that it fell squarely into that category of events that no one could have made it up from whole cloth.

As for the request that he perform an operational act, few moments of thought had given him the time to grasp just how few people in the U.S. government could even make such a request of honest diplomats. Someone with serious pull at a very high level was desperate enough to ask the State Department to take on a job that the spooks from Langley usually performed. Ettleman thought the order had to have come from the secretary of state at least, which suggested the National Security Council was involved or possibly the president himself. In fact, he was sure that CIA’s leadership must have been galled at the thought of asking a diplomat to help; that they had was surely a sign of how desperate they’d become.

They were CIA, all of them. It had to be true, and if it was, the CIA station in Moscow had been gutted, maybe down to the last officer. How that could have happened, the State officer had no idea, and his clique at work had posited one theory after another, each more insane than the last. If even the least improbable of them was true, the Russian government had done tremendous damage to his country’s national security.

Ettleman was no spy, had no particular love for the CIA, but he considered himself ambitious, and if the Agency’s fat was that deep in the fire, he didn’t need long to figure that agreeing to perform this single duty would earn him the favor of someone very, very senior. Still, there was the small issue of completing the operational act without getting caught, and he couldn’t imagine why he’d been chosen. The young man had met the U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation exactly once and that had been the perfunctory greeting that all new embassy staff received during their orientation on their first day at the diplomatic outpost. Now he’d been called in and asked to take this assignment that was far out of his lane. It seemed simple enough. He was to take a bag home, acting entirely normal on the walk, and deliver it to a CIA officer who would meet him there. He wasn’t to open the bag under any circumstances, but he wasn’t to resist if he was detained by the host country’s security services. Ettleman had agreed on the single condition that the ambassador never, ever make any such request of him again. The young diplomat was willing to take his chances once in the pursuit of a commendation that would guarantee his next promotion and choice of assignments, but had no desire to see the interior of Lubyanka or risk eviction more than once from the country for actions “inconsistent with his diplomatic status,” as the Russians would call it.

Taking the assignment had seemed like a smart move until he’d stepped outside the embassy gates with the nylon bag slung over his shoulder. He was just another diplomat going home, but all of his senses were heightened and he was sure that everyone around him knew that he was on a special mission, that even the most casual Russian pedestrian knew he was carrying something valuable. Serious anxiety set in once the embassy was out of sight and he was sufficiently agitated that a fellow commuter on the Moscow subway had asked him whether he was taken ill. The winter was coming on and Americans were not as hardy as the average Muscovite after all. Drink more vodka and buy a good hat, he was told. Even an American could get through a Russian winter with one of the latter and enough of the former.

Once he was aboveground again, Ettleman wondered whether he was being followed, but the young diplomat had no training for detecting surveillance. He simply walked home, fighting the urge to hurry his pace, but it was like his body was fighting him, trying to break out into a dead run. The fight-or-flight urge was strong and it took all of his self-control to keep it checked.

Reaching the top floor of his apartment building, Ettleman scanned the concrete landing to his small apartment three times to make sure he was alone. The amount of adrenaline flooding his system was truly impressive and he hated what it was doing to his senses. Langley morons, he muttered inside his head. Get themselves all evicted and now they need us to do their job and just maybe I get evicted too.

He set the nylon bag on the floor by his feet, leaning it against his leg so he could be sure it wouldn’t move while he fished the key out of his pocket. There was no one anywhere nearby that he could tell, but Ettleman found his mind was running through every worst case it could conjure. At the moment, he was sure that the Russian FSB had some world-class sprinter racing up the stairs to grab the nylon bag. But there were no sounds other than his own heavy breathing and the clinking of his key against the door as his shaking hand failed to get it into the lock until his fourth attempt.

The door opened, Ettleman retrieved the bag and stepped inside, trying and failing to look casual. He was a poor actor and he knew it, but the door was closed within a few moments, locked and bolted. The need for pretense gone, the young man felt a small bit of his anxiety subside—

“Joshua Ettleman?” the voice asked. The diplomat yelped and spun around, scrambling for anything he could use as a weapon and scanning the room in a wild panic, his heart now pounding hard enough that he could feel the blood running behind his eyes. Nothing was within reach.

There was a young woman sitting on the couch. She was dressed in khakis, tactical pants, and low brown hiking boots, her dirty-blond hair pulled back away from her face. The woman was about his own age as best he could figure and quite pretty, he realized, after he was able to start thinking rationally again, which took several more seconds. She waited patiently until he could calm himself, as though she understood the irrational fear she’d inspired just by asking his name… but her accent was American, he realized. She was not a Russian, and therefore he had not been caught by the FSB.

“Who are you?” he demanded, the questions coming out far ruder than he’d intended.

The woman stood, blue jacket and khaki pants not hiding her curves very much. “You can call me Kyra,” she said, smiling. “They told me that you would be expecting me. I promise, I’m harmless.”

He noticed that she didn’t explain who “they” were, and as for her being harmless, Ettleman doubted that very much. He tried to take some deep breaths, and it took a few seconds for the shock the adrenaline had given to his system to subside. “They told me that someone was going to meet me at my place,” he said. “They didn’t say you were going to let yourself in. I thought my locks were better than that.” He regretted the stupid observation as soon as he said it. She’s CIA, moron. She knows how to pick a lock.

The woman shrugged. “Sorry, not so much. You know the Russians probably have already been in your apartment at least once, right?”

“I… State is supposed to install a security system, but they haven’t gotten to it yet… you know, paperwork… our security office moves at the speed of government—”

Kyra smiled. “A security system won’t help. The FSB isn’t going to let a commercial system stop them if they want to come in here. I can show you some other ways you can figure out whether you’ve had an intruder, but you’re not going to be able to keep them out. Don’t worry, I swept the place, didn’t find anything. Doesn’t mean it’s clean, but you probably haven’t really come up on their radar yet.”

“I’ve only been here since July,” Ettleman stammered. His initial panic was gone, finally, and now he was finding himself anxious for another reason entirely. The young woman was the first visitor to his apartment and he was sure that he hadn’t made much of an impression on her.

“I know,” Kyra said. She smiled.

“You do?”

“Your clothes are all American brands, suggesting that you haven’t been in-country long enough to need to shop at any of the local stores for replacements,” she replied. “And I don’t see any obviously Russian souvenirs. You have some very nice ones from Turkey and Argentina, nice enough to show you have decent taste. So the lack of anything local means this isn’t your first overseas assignment, but you haven’t been here long enough to pick up anything you think is worth showing off to visitors. And there was that lack of a security system.”

“Oh,” Ettleman said.

“Sorry, but that’s probably why they picked you,” she told him. “They needed someone who the locals probably figured was an unlikely candidate to act as a courier.”

Ettleman was silent for a moment while he absorbed her admission. “And someone dispensable if they got caught.” He cursed himself. The ambassador picked me because I’m nobody.

The woman looked at him, as though she could divine his thoughts from the look on his face. “Have you read Churchill?”

“Winston Churchill?”

The woman nodded. “ ‘To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.’ ” Kyra smiled at him. “Right now they needed someone to do a ‘very special thing’ that was fitted to you. They needed someone who could fly right under the Russians’ radar, and you did. I know that carrying a bag around doesn’t seem like much, but if everything works out, what you just did is going to help a lot of people. Your moment came and you stepped up… your finest moment, until you have a bigger one. You should be proud of that.”

Ettleman tried not to gape at the woman who had just turned his anxiety into elation with a few words. She nodded toward the nylon bag. “I assume that’s for me?” she asked.

She was looking at his laptop bag. “Oh, yeah,” Ettleman said. He offered it and Kyra took it from him. She unzipped it and looked inside.

“I don’t know even know what’s in it—”

“A quarter million euros,” Kyra said. She pulled out one of the bundles and rifled through the bills to prove the point. “And a disguise kit and a false passport, all sent through the diplomatic pouch from Langley.”

“A quarter… million?” Ettleman repeated in quiet surprise, his voice quavering, much to his embarrassment. He looked inside. The bag held euros, all €500 banknotes. The foreign service officer didn’t know the day’s exchange rate, but he was sure that he’d been carrying more than his annual salary, enough that any Russian thug would have gutted him for the pile without a thought. “They told me not to open it. I didn’t, swear to—”

“I believe you,” the woman assured him.

Idiot, he thought. Now she thinks you didn’t have the stones to even check out what you were carrying around. “I mean, I wanted to, but I thought, maybe, you know, operational security—”

“You followed your orders. That means you’re not stupid.” She exhaled, then smiled, sheepish, which sent Ettleman’s heart rate up again. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. It’s been a tough week and I’ve… the guy who trained me was kind of blunt and I’ve picked up the habit.”

“That’s okay,” Ettleman said. He would’ve forgiven this woman of murder if she would smile at him again. “They said you’d need a few other things?”

The woman nodded. “Nothing exotic,” she advised. “I’ll raid your closet later. Do you have a laptop and a printer?” Ettleman nodded. “Unplug everything from the Internet and shut down any wireless connections you have running. You’re fluent in Russian? I need to type a letter and I’ll need you to translate it after I’m done. And a hot shower would be very kind.”

“Oh, uh, sure,” Ettleman said. “The shower is at the end of the hall. I’ll get you a towel.”

“That would be lovely, thank you.” Kyra smiled at him again. “And you don’t have to be nervous. You’re doing fine.” Then she turned away and headed for his shower.

The man’s heart soared and sank at the same time. Maybe he’d applied for the wrong career after all, Ettleman thought. Delivering huge piles of money to strange and attractive women who showed up in his apartment, reading his mind through his body language and asking for his services and amenities? He could get used to that.