The Fall of Moscow Station

CHAPTER TWO

Kathy Cooke’s new office was quite austere. Six months into her new appointment, the former CIA director had enjoyed little time to arrange it to her liking. Papers sat in manila folders organized in neat stacks on the desk, edges aligned as with a ruler. Personal trophies that meant nothing to anyone but the owner occupied the shelves that other people would have used for books, including several ceremonial weapons that were probably illegal to have in a federal building. There were no diplomas or performance awards hanging on the walls, and the pictures were all of family, with none of the usual vanity photos of the occupant shaking hands with this president or that foreign leader. Humility was a rare trait among senior government officials, but Cooke had learned early on that a healthy dose of meekness tended to save her a lot of trouble later on.

She’d always kept her office at CIA mostly impersonal for the duration of her five-year tenure, in no small part because she’d never expected to hold the job very long. Leaders at that level of government service tended to have short terms in office, usually lasting only until some new president was elected. That she had survived under two surprised her more than anyone else, and Rostow had made it no secret that he’d wanted her out. She hadn’t really wanted to retire from the job, but the president was no respecter of the Agency and Cooke had resisted his maneuvering more to protect the people at Langley than out of any personal ambition. Had Rostow been a better man, she would have been happy to retire. She wasn’t yet fifty, her professional options would have been legion, and she and Jon could finally have gotten on with the personal life they’d kept on hold for too long.

Jon, she thought. Cooke hadn’t seen the chief of CIA’s Red Cell for almost a month now. Langley was just a few miles up the road to the northeast, but her promotion had put more distance between them than the geography. Her schedule was hardly conducive to having any kind of personal life.

Cooke had no idea how her boss had convinced the chief executive to promote her. She hadn’t wanted the job, had even thought about rejecting it when the DNI had called. But she served at the pleasure of the president, even when the man was a hostile, arrogant cuss. The Senate had confirmed her fairly quickly, and the only votes not cast in her favor had been abstentions.

She’d decided to give it three years. Three years would satisfy her sense of duty, she thought, and then she would walk away. But there were still issues to resolve before that happened. The most distressing was the one she could do the least about at the moment.

Cooke stared down at the copy of Der Spiegel. CIA had attached a printed translation of the lead article on the German daily’s front page.

The secure phone rang, interrupting her reading. She knew who was calling and what the subject of conversation would be. She’d told her secretary to block every other call from anyone who ranked lower than herself, which was almost everyone in the intelligence community now. She picked up the handset. “How’s Berlin?” she asked without preamble.

“Depressing.” Clark Barron’s voice was deep, the resonance masked by the digital encryption, but the man’s somber tone came across the line perfectly clear. The CIA director of the National Clandestine Service was an unhappy man at the moment. “I’ve got a cable coming your way with the details, but I wanted to give you an informal report first,” he said. “The Bundesnachrichtendienst let me see the body and their forensic evidence. It’s Strelnikov, no question. Coroner says he drowned.” The Bundesnachrichtendienst was Germany’s foreign intelligence service.

“He drowned?” Cooke asked, incredulous. “How does a former Spetsnaz officer drown?” The question was entirely rhetorical.

Barron answered it anyway. “By having someone hold his head under,” he offered. “I think Maines gave him up, but this isn’t the way the Russians do business. They keep suspects stuck in the homeland while they build airtight cases, and then they nail them. They don’t send them abroad to execute them, and they sure don’t move this fast. Doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“Yeah,” Cooke acknowledged. She stared out his window, then shut her eyes tight, wishing the reality away. One of the CIA’s most important assets was dead. The only question now was how the Russians had found him out, and the most likely answer promised more disasters to come.

Cooke shunted her emotions aside and set herself to the business. “Clark, I’m going to send Jon and Kyra out to you. They’re good at pulling things like this apart.”

“Yeah, they are,” Barron confirmed. “How fast can you get them out here?”

“I’ll have them on a plane to Berlin by tonight.”

Cooke couldn’t see the NCS director nod his head on the other side of the Atlantic. “I’ll pick them up. One question… do they have a blank check to follow this thing into Moscow?”

“If that’s where the trail leads. Your discretion,” Cooke said. “One more thing, Clark?”

“Yeah, boss?”

“If you get a chance to bring Maines home, you don’t need to be gentle with him on my account.”

“Understood,” Barron replied. “He’ll come home breathing and mentally undamaged. He’ll have to consider anything else a bonus.”

“Roger that,” Cooke said. “Good hunting.” She didn’t wait for her subordinate to hang up the phone before doing it herself. She swiveled her chair around to face her computer and checked the in-box. Barron’s promised cable hadn’t arrived yet. The DNI was waiting for his own briefing and she wasn’t going to deliver it until she had the official report in hand. She was tempted to call over to CIA’s operations center to ask about it, but decided to wait. No doubt Barron had marked up the electronic report with all of the code words and crypts that would send it screaming through the system to his in-box as fast as the system would allow. It would be on her screen within the hour, barring inattention of incompetence of the ops center staff, and, if not, the thrashing they would receive wouldn’t be dished out over the phone.

Cooke exhaled in frustration, checked her watch, and the waiting started again.

The morning fog covered the German fields in gray smoke, hiding the fields until the plane was nearly on the ground. Kyra Stryker couldn’t see the sun or sky once the aircraft was on the tarmac, which was slick from a storm that had passed through during the night. Silver puddles were scattered across the blacktop, spraying in all directions as planes and support trucks drove through them.

She had not expected to visit Germany during her career, certainly not during her first ten years anyway. European assignments were so often reserved for senior officers who had served their time in less desirable posts and had the personal connections on Langley’s Seventh Floor to lock up the positions they wanted. Getting the truly prized assignments required both a track record and inside help. Kyra knew she could and would be good at it, but three years’ working in the Red Cell had left her wondering whether she wanted to try.

Kyra exhaled hard. The man next to her looked at her sideways. “Nervous?” Jonathan Burke, the chief of the Red Cell didn’t turn his head to confirm the guess. Jon wore his usual khakis and an oxford shirt, no tie or jacket. He kept both on a hanger behind his office door but she’d never seen him wear them. Only God and the White House get a coat and tie, he’d once said, and she’d never seen the middle-aged man break that rule for anyone else. Few noticed. He avoided people as much as they allowed.

“About the mission? No,” Kyra said after a moment’s thought, surprising herself. “After you’ve been shot at, not much else gets the blood pressure up. It’s hard to care about what people think after someone’s made a serious effort to kill you. But it does get really hard to put up with stupidity.”

“And now you see why people consider me prickly,” Jon said.

“They’re not wrong,” she teased.

Both customs and the luggage handlers lived up to the myth of German efficiency, and the analysts were in the city within the hour. Berlin fascinated Kyra as it passed by in the window. She’d seen so many cities that had sacrificed their character for modern amenities, but Berlin had retained a look of old history. There were few true skyscrapers jutting above the stone buildings and rounded domes that looked centuries old. It was impressive, she thought, given how much of skyline had been bombed into wreckage by the Allies during the Second World War and how much had been rebuilt while the city served as the front line of the Cold War. These Germans had survived hell itself for decades and Berlin was now the testament to their endurance.

The hotel was a decent choice, and Kyra had breakfast brought up to her room. She rarely slept on planes and the pilot stubbornly had plowed through a series of Atlantic storms, robbing her of what little rest she might have enjoyed. Jon was always telling her not to substitute caffeine for sleep, but time was a zero-sum game in counterintelligence, always working for the hunter or the prey, but never both. Kyra didn’t want to give Alden Maines or the Russians more time. German coffee and energy drinks would solve the jet-lag problem for one day at the cost of shaky hands, but she would manage it.

The U.S. Embassy was close, eight blocks away on foot. The Marine guards ran their IDs and let them pass. Like them, Clark Barron was a visitor with no office in the building of his own. It took some time to find the man and an unused classified space where they could talk.

The conference room was government standard except for the high-backed leather chairs that surrounded the table. The windows gave a view to the north and a small curio case of foreign gifts sat in one of the opposite corners. Relief maps of every continent but their own hung on the walls.

“Good to see you both again. It’s been a while since Pioneer and the Farm,” the NCS director said.

“Better times than this,” Jon agreed. “What can we do for you?”

“To keep it short and blunt, we’ve got a case that makes no sense. And it’ll probably be the most tightly compartmented case you’ll ever get read into at the Agency.”

Barron set a copy of Der Spiegel on the table with a printed translation of one article attached. “Three days ago, the German Federal Criminal Investigation Office pulled a body out of the Großer Müggelsee Lake southeast of Berlin. Forensic investigators identified him as retired lieutenant general Stepan Illarionovich Strelnikov, director of the Russian Foundation for Advanced Research, their version of DOD’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Moscow Times ran his obituary today. The Russian government says he drowned while going for a swim.”

Jon pulled the article across the table, turned it around, and scanned the translated page. “It’s not every day that a retired Russian flag officer drowns, is it?”

“Not one who’s the Russian equivalent of a Navy SEAL.” Barron handed the analysts a folder. The first page was Strelnikov’s biography, with a stapled photograph of a man dressed in a Russian general’s uniform, portly, with pronounced jowls, dark eyes, and the dour expression that seemed to be a Russian birthright.

“He was a new asset, barely a year on the books, and a volunteer,” Barron told them. “We had high hopes for him, until someone gave him up.”

“A mole?” Jon asked.

“A defector,” Barron corrected him. “Kyra, I’m sorry about this one.” The next page showed a photograph of a middle-aged man, midforties, thin, with black hair lightening at the temples. He had bright eyes, green, with a Roman nose and a day’s stubble. The man wore a suit and stood before an American flag. Burke recognized it as the kind of photo that senior leaders were privileged to take when they reached sufficient rank. Not every Agency officer got to take one during his career.

“Alden Maines,” Kyra said before Barron could name him.

“You know him?” Jon asked.

“He was deputy chief of station in Caracas when I was there,” she said, her voice flat. “He got me out of the country after I was shot.” She took the file out of Jon’s hands, dropped it on the table, and leaned over it, hands in her hair.

“After our station down there was torn to shreds, he couldn’t work South America anymore,” Barron added. “He put together the operation to get Kyra out on the fly, and I thought that was worth a reward. I also wanted to see what he could really do, so I brought him back to headquarters and made him deputy chief of Russia House. But I’m told he didn’t like the desk. Then the current chief of Russia House retired and Maines applied for the job, but I was having second thoughts about him by then. Maines had been showing contempt for leadership since he got back from Venezuela… started abusing the people under him too. I interviewed him and he displayed a nasty mix of narcissism and sadism. So I chose the other candidate. I was going to move Maines to some other assignment, where we could sideline him and he couldn’t put ops or people at risk.”

“I guess Alden didn’t like that decision,” Kyra observed. “He was never like that in Caracas. I always thought he was one of the good ones.”

“It doesn’t look that way,” Barron agreed. “The FBI was tailing a Russian diplomat who was on their list of suspected intel officers. They followed him out to the Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve in Loudoun County, twenty miles west of Dulles Airport, and figured that he was using it as a dead-drop site. They put the area under surveillance. A week later, he loaded the drop. The special agents on the scene were smart enough to let him go, then crack open the package and take pictures. Then they holed up and watched to see who came for it. Maines showed up. Pictures are in the folder.”

Kyra turned Maines’s photograph over and found several more underneath, one of a stack of bills, another showing an out-of-focus letter with a transcription clipped onto the back.

“That stack of hundreds in the package works out to be something like fifty thousand dollars… probably bona fides money,” Barron said. “Maines had to give the Russians something juicy to prove that he was a serious turncoat. Most Russian assets get a pittance, if they get anything at all. The last ones they paid that kind of money to were Robert Hannsen and Aldrich Ames.”

“I assume that giving up Strelnikov would’ve been worth fifty thousand?” Jon asked.

“Ten times that much, easy,” Barron replied. “Maines gave him up cheap. Anyway, FBI Director Menard put a surveillance detail on him and got a warrant for cell-phone and Internet taps. Five days ago, Maines made like he was going to work. Surveillance lost him, he never showed up at headquarters, and he never came home.”

“A deputy chief of Russia House defecting to the Russians could shut us down in Moscow,” Kyra observed.

“He knows about all of our tech ops and key assets,” Barron agreed. “If he’s talking to the Kremlin, there’s probably not an intel officer in the city from any of the English-speaking countries who’s safe, much less our assets. I’ve suspended all human operations there as of this time yesterday and the chief of station is preparing to exfiltrate our key assets, but it’ll take a few weeks to get the resources in place.”

Jon turned the file on the table, looked at Maines’s biography, then turned it back. “Sounds like a straightforward greed-and-revenge defector,” he said, the boredom in his voice clear.

“It was until three days ago,” Barron agreed. “First, Strelnikov turns up dead just a few days after Maines fingers him. That’s not how the Russians operate. They’re methodical. They build airtight cases so they can rip our operations open in a public trial. They watched Oleg Penkovsky for months before they grabbed him and he was giving up nuclear secrets.”

Barron leaned across the table and offered the analysts another photograph. Kyra took the picture… Maines standing in a customs line at an airport. “Second, two days ago, the Russian ambassador walked into Main State and gave that up. We’ve identified the airport where that was taken as Berlin Schönefeld. The ambassador told SecState that Maines was defecting.”

Kyra’s eyes grew wide “He’s here?” she asked, incredulous.

“Looks that way,” Barron said. “What we can’t figure is why the Russians burned him. Maines could’ve been an incredibly valuable asset to the Russians. There was no good reason to burn him that we can see, and now he won’t be worth anything to them in a few months. I would say they were dumb, but I have the feeling someone is getting played and I don’t want it to be us.”

“It’s not us,” Jon said, his voice flat. “It’s Maines.”

“I want to believe that more than you know,” Barron said. “What’re you thinking?”

“Maines wasn’t planning on defecting. Look at the letter… this sentence here,” Jon ordered, pointing to the second paragraph.

“You don’t establish a covert communications system for an asset unless you’re expecting him to keep working for you,” Kyra observed.

“That’s not even the interesting part,” Jon said. “The money is.”

“How so?” Barron asked.

“Given how tight the Russians are with a ruble, not just anyone could authorize a fifty-G payout,” Jon offered. “Add onto that Strelnikov’s former military rank and his position as the head of the Russia’s DARPA, and it’s obvious that not just anyone could order his execution.”

The NCS director frowned but his expression betrayed his agreement. “Makes sense,” Barron replied. “Still doesn’t tell me why they burned Maines.”

“There’s only one reason that makes sense, don’t you think?” Jon asked, looking at Kyra.

The woman stared down at the photograph of Maines in the airport. “Running an asset is slow business,” she started, thinking as she talked. The puzzle unraveled in her head in an instant. “Impatience will get your people killed, but the Russians are being impatient, which means they’re worried or scared. They’re in damage-control mode, trying to protect something or someone very important. So whoever took out Strelnikov has leaks he needs plugged, he wants it done fast, and Maines knows where the leaks are. So Strelnikov’s killer tricks Maines into leaving the U.S. and then burns his bridge back. Now Maines has to depend on him for protection, and the cost of that protection will be a complete download of everything he knows.”

“You’re saying that the Russians are blackmailing their own asset?” Barron asked, incredulous. “That doesn’t make sense if he’s already playing for their team.”

“It does if you consider that Maines is a new asset… so new that the Russians don’t really know him or what his motivations are,” Kyra explained. “Some traitors still have morals or principles, and won’t give up everything they know. But that’s not acceptable if this Russian really is desperate to plug some leaks and doesn’t think he has much time to do it. So he needs leverage to force Maines to give up everything right now.”

Kyra realized that she’d been staring into the distance, unfocused on the men in the room as she’d thought through the story. She looked down. Jon was smiling, Barron was horrified. “Sir,” she said, “if that’s right, you may not have a few weeks to exfiltrate any of those assets. The Russians could start dropping them anytime. They might kill them as fast as Maines identifies them, the same as Strelnikov.”

Barron muttered a curse. “If that’s true… we have no way to figure out who’s at the top of the hit list.”

“No, there is a way,” Jon disagreed. Barron looked up, hopeful. “Figure out who ordered Strelnikov’s execution and what he’s trying to protect. Do that and you can identify which remaining assets are his biggest threats. But…” He trailed off.

“Yes?”

Jon hesitated, then looked to Kyra. He doesn’t know how to say it gently, she realized. Kyra tumbled the thought about in her mind for a few moments before deciding that there were no gentle words for it. “We can start with Strelnikov’s file. That might give us an idea of where to start. But after that… dead assets might be the only other clues we’ll get to answer the question.”

“That’s not acceptable,” Barron said, his voice turning cold.

“The only other option is to talk to Maines,” Jon said. “If the Russians have pulled a bait and switch on him, he might not be happy about his current situation.”

“And how, exactly, would we get in the same room with him?” Barron asked.

“If Maines really is in town, he’s either at the Russian Embassy or a safe house,” Kyra said, thinking aloud. “If it’s a safe house, someone at the embassy will know where. So we go to the embassy.”

“Good luck even getting the Russians to admit they have anyone in our business at the embassy,” Jon mused.

“They can do a lot worse than say no,” Barron warned. “If the Russians really are desperate to use Maines’s information to plug some leaks, there’s no telling how they might react when you show up asking for him.”

“I don’t think,” Jon said, his mind engaged now. “They were the ones who told us where he was. They had to expect that we’d come asking about him. They might even be planning on it.”

“And it might offer some clues besides dead bodies that will help us figure this out,” Kyra added. “So let’s go knock on the door.”

Kyra sat in the empty conference room, focused on Maines’s file to distract herself. She’d read it twice already, and had found it surreal to read about the operation he’d led to save her from the Venezuelan SEBIN. Moving on, she saw that Barron’s clinical words about narcissism and sadism had softened his description of the true problem. She’d only known Maines a few months before she’d been pulled from the country, had liked him well enough. He’d been a decisive leader, amiable, with a concern for his subordinates that she’d thought genuine at the time. The papers on the table had shaken that conclusion.

On the first reading, the file seemed nothing more than the record of a solid career, with no obvious signs of personal or professional distress. Her second review revealed that the high marks and bureaucratic language used to avoid legal issues were hiding a flawed man. There were no reprimands or disciplinary actions in the records, but performance covered a multitude of sins. Case officers considered sin itself a tool for plying their trade, and if the practitioners indulged on occasion, that was the price of business so long as they didn’t cross certain lines. But pride and wrath were capital vices too, and Alden Maines’s arrogance and temper both had bloated until he couldn’t accept that his decisions could be faulty or see any better way to deal with his failures than making his staff into targets.

The file had been thin, which Kyra hoped was the result of some nervous counterintelligence manager’s fear that giving away too much would jeopardize the investigation. There were less noble reasons why such files often were thin. Information was the life’s blood of intelligence, but it was also the black-market currency of bureaucrats and only reluctantly did they give it away for free if they thought it had some value they could trade for favors or some other advantage. But there was enough in the papers to ensure she would lose sleep tonight trying to dissect the puzzle Maines had left behind. One line in the Russians’ dead-drop letter stood out in her mind.

Kyra had parsed the words so many times that she’d lost count, but the implication never changed, like a quiet voice in her mind. They’re in a hurry, she thought. The Russians knew that they had a rich source to tap and they wanted to start mining him immediately. Maines imagined that it was so they could talk face-to-face, issue him taskings, and settle on a communications plan in hours that would take them weeks or months to work out through dead drops alone. But if Jon’s theory was right, the Russians were more impatient than that. Maines could’ve been a long-running source, like a deep mine in a mountain, full of endless veins that could produce valuable ores for years. Now the Russians were prepared to strip-mine that resource in a single stroke, looking for only a few tidbits of Maines’s information that they considered more valuable than his long-term potential.

What operation is so important that it’s worth burning an asset like him? Kyra wondered. Any of the answers she could imagine scared her more than she wanted to admit even to herself.

She finally heard Jon enter. “Barron approved your plan,” the man said.

Kyra stared at her mentor, taking in his face. “You’re worried about it.”

He nodded and his eyes stared off at some point in the distance as he always did when he was talking and thinking at the same time. “The Russians are vicious. We’ve tangled with the Chinese and the Iranians and the Venezuelans and came out with everything attached, but the Russians play on their own level. Anyone who isn’t scared of the Russian intel machine is either stupid or ignorant.”

“They’re not perfect,” Kyra said. “You’re the historian. You know our people outplayed them plenty of times during the Cold War.”

“ ‘Quantity has a quality all its own,’ ” Jon quipped.

Kyra frowned. “What are you saying?”

“That was something Stalin said when a critic pointed out that his enormous army was mostly untrained conscripts. When the other guy has enough people on his side, he can afford mistakes. It’s the one who’s outmanned that has to be perfect, and even that might not be enough. If the enemy is big enough, sometimes he only has to hit you once and the fight’s over. The only question is whether you’re humble enough to stay on the mat. Can’t fight when you’re dead.”

Kyra felt an ache in her arm, under the scar that a Venezuelan bullet had left behind years before. “Jon, we have to help.”

He glared at her. “Leading with your heart is a fine way to get yourself killed.”

Kyra smiled. She’d seen him surrender to the inevitable before. “God hates a coward,” she said.

“Your plan is only marginally insane,” Barron said. To be fair, the analysts had only worked on it for an hour before approaching him, but he supposed that time was working for traitors today. The proposal Kyra had offered him had taken less than two minutes to explain.

“I’m open to a better one,” Kyra told him.

“I called Langley. No one there has anything either. Honestly, I don’t mind a little insanity when it’s called for. The Russians practically sent us an invitation to come talk, but they’ve got some agenda and I’ve got no idea what it is,” Barron admitted.

“I could talk to the ambassador… see if he’d be willing to send one of these State Department boys in to talk,” Kyra suggested.

“I thought about that,” Barron told her. “But they don’t know the right questions to ask, and Maines is our problem anyway. Plan approved. When are you going?”

“First thing in the morning, as soon as we can get a disguise in place,” she replied. “Maines will know who I am, but there’s no sense in giving the Russians an easy picture of my real face.”

“Agreed,” Barron replied. “How’s Jon doing?” The tone of his voice suggested he wasn’t asking about her partner’s professional performance.

“The same,” she admitted. “He’s been this way ever since Marissa was killed last year. He’s never been the happiest man I ever met, but I’m pretty sure he’s clinically depressed. I tried to get him to see one of the Agency psychologists, get him on something that’ll help him climb out of the dark, but he won’t go.”

“I guess I’d be feeling down if one of my old flames died in front of me like that,” Barron said. “Doesn’t help that Kathy left either. She’s the one person who could really help him, but the DNI is keeping her busy. Do you know if they’ve talked?”

“I don’t think so, not for a few months anyway,” Kyra said.

“Do you think he’s a danger—”

“No,” Kyra answered, too readily. “He’s usually pretty morose anyway. I’m sure he’ll come through it eventually.”

“Keep an eye on him,” Barron ordered. “If it looks like he’s becoming nonfunctional, let me know and we’ll bring him home. The Russians are too good at the game for us to keep anyone in the field who can’t keep themselves together.”

“I will, sir.”

“Good hunting.”

“Thank you, sir,” Kyra said. She sat back, closed her eyes, and wondered whether Barron should ever have let her friend come to Berlin.