The Fall of Moscow Station

CHAPTER FIVE

Of the innumerable diplomats and foreign leaders that President Daniel Rostow had met, he disliked the Russian ambassador to the U.S. the most. Igor Nikolayevich Galushka smiled so rarely that he frightened most everyone who knew him when he did. The Russian diplomat had come from a background that would have crushed the ambitions of other men in the Kremlin. He was a farmer’s son from Fedyakovoan, an unremarkable village seated two hundred miles east of Moscow on the back of the Volga River, and had no advantages of family or business connections to the men who ruled the country. That he had managed to survive the various political and personal purges of the previous three decades and get himself one of the most important postings in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was more a testament to his lack of ethics than any diplomatic skill. That was fine by him and his superiors. Most important policies between nations were hashed out over the phone between leaders. Ambassadors were used only when the chiefs of state didn’t want to answer unpleasant questions, and Galushka excelled at being the bearer of appalling news.

Galushka had demanded, not asked, to see Rostow. The president had granted the request, summoned the secretary of state and his national security adviser to the Oval Office for the meeting, and made Galushka wait fifteen minutes for no good reason before admitting him to the room. The Secret Service officer on duty admitted the Russian diplomat, then took up a position by the closed door.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. President,” Galushka began after the pleasantries were finished. “I regret that this will not be a friendly visit.”

Rostow doubted that Galushka regretted anything. “I do hope that we can resolve your issue in a fair way.”

“To speak in honesty, Mr. President, there is nothing you need do except comply with single demand that I must make,” Galushka told him. “As you are aware, I am sure, our security services are the most skilled in the world at counterintelligence. They have been running a major operation for some time, and have confirmed that your country has brought a number of spies into our motherland under the false pretenses of being diplomats and businessmen. This is unacceptable! The presence of a single infiltrator would be unacceptable to us, but the scale of your activity is appalling. Our president has reaffirmed his readiness to expand cooperation with the U.S., including the cooperation of our intelligence agencies in fighting terrorism, but such provocations are in the spirit of the ‘Cold War’ and undermine the mutual trust we both value.”

“I assure you, Igor, your services must be mistaken—” Rostow began.

The Russian reached into his jacket, withdrew a single sheet of folded paper, and laid it on the Resolute desk. “This is a list of the CIA spies that our security services have identified in our country. I am here to inform you that my government has declared them all persona non grata, unwanted persons expelled from our soil for engaging in activities inconsistent with their diplomatic status. Their expulsion is mandatory and they and their families must leave our soil within twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours? That’s unreasonable, Igor. You can’t expect people to settle their affairs, pack up, and evacuate in a single day.”

“Given the scale of American perfidy in this matter, that is all the time we are prepared to offer. The number of spies you have sent into the Russian Federation beggars the imagination.”

Rostow frowned, picked up the paper, and unfolded it. The list of names was arranged in two columns and almost filled the page. “Igor, this can’t possibly be right. Are you trying to gut our embassy?” Rostow protested. He had abandoned any thoughts of diplomatic phrasing.

“The list is correct,” Galushka replied. “Our foreign minister has summoned your ambassador in Moscow to receive our formal demarche and is sharing the same information with him. However, in the spirit of generosity, we will not arrest the ones who lack diplomatic cover. They will be allowed to leave peacefully, but any of them still within our borders after the deadline will be subject to the full penalties of our law.”

“Igor, this would not be a wise move—”

“It is done, Mr. President. It was not my decision. I am here only to inform you of it.” Galushka stood. “I will take up no more of your time. I am sure that you will need to consult with your cabinet and others to facilitate this new state of affairs.”

Rostow nodded at the Russian ambassador, then looked down to reread the list.

Isaac Menard disliked any visit to the White House. FBI directors rarely were the bearers of good tidings and most presidents came to dread any private meetings with them. Six presidents had lived in outright fear of J. Edgar Hoover, the man who’d ruled over the Bureau for almost fifty years. Hoover had menaced so many politicians for so long that Menard was sure that a fear of the FBI had become part of the White House’s institutional memory, something that was just part of the air, breathed in and internalized by every president of the United States and his staff, whether they were conscious of it or not. Harrison Stuart, the man who’d appointed him, had been friendly enough; but President Rostow’s behavior toward Menard seemed to match the theory, always keeping their visits short and efficient, with no pleasantries exchanged. Menard always had the sense that Rostow wanted the FBI director out of his presence as quickly as possible, like an apostate wanting the priest at his doorstep to leave him to his sins in peace.

Menard had been summoned to the Oval Office this morning, which was a rare event, so he assumed it would be Rostow delivering the unwelcome news today. It’ll be about Maines, Menard told himself. Some development in that case. There were no other active cases that warranted a U.S. president’s attention. He had dispatched a small team of special agents to Berlin, but they had nothing new to report since the CIA’s woman had met with Maines at the Russian Embassy. Menard had wanted it to be one of his own people who’d gone in, but Clark Barron had persuaded him to let his own person go. The FBI director respected that. Barron wanted first crack at cleaning up the mess one of his own people had made, and Menard would’ve asked for the same favor had he been in Barron’s seat. But the Louisiana-born former special agent was very happy not to be in Barron’s chair. He much preferred hunting spies to running them. The moral lines in his mind surrounding the jobs were cleaner, less blurred. Menard liked keeping the black and white very close together, with as little gray between them as possible.

Rostow’s secretary admitted him to the Oval Office and closed the northeastern door behind him. “Come on in, Isaac,” Rostow ordered. The couches in the room were mostly full, with only one space left. Cyrus Marshall, director of national intelligence, sat to Rostow’s immediate right, and Kathryn Cooke, deputy director of national intelligence, next to him. Rostow’s dislike of the woman was no secret. For her to be in the room was a sign of unpleasant things.

Menard had known Cooke for years, their respective jobs requiring them to share information about foreign intelligence services working in the U.S. Menard nodded at the woman. Should’ve kept you in the top job at Langley, Menard thought. Not tried to give it to an amateur who’s still waiting for a vote on the Hill. Maybe Congress would be smart and reject Rostow’s pick, opening up another chance for the president to do the smart thing and tap Clark Barron for CIA director. Not likely, Menard thought. Heaven forbid we should ever give the job to people who actually climbed the ranks. Menard himself had been appointed by Rostow’s predecessor, a man who had valued an appointee’s potential political capital less than his time in service and the experience that came with it. But Harrison Stuart had been a very rare breed among chief executives.

“Good evening, everyone,” Menard said.

“Good evening, Isaac,” Kathy replied. Her voice sounded flat, without emotion, as though the woman was trying to hold something inside.

“I know this is unusual,” Rostow said, impatient, “but I had a visit with Igor Galushka an hour ago. He said that the Russian security services had just wrapped up a major counterintelligence op and identified a lot of our intel officers over there. They’ve ordered all of the following and their families out of the country.” The president passed out copies of Galushka’s list.

Cooke’s expression at seeing the paper confirmed the Russian’s accusations. “How bad is it, Kathy?” the president asked. There was no current CIA director and Rostow thought it beneath him to consort with acting directors of any agency. Cooke, the last occupant of Langley’s top job, was now his best source of information.

The deputy DNI took her time before answering. She scanned the page several times, matching the names on the paper against the ones in her head. “It looks like they’ve targeted almost everyone the Agency has in the country, including several under nonofficial cover who don’t have diplomatic immunity.” She folded the paper and set it down. “This wasn’t from a counterintelligence operation. This was Maines giving up every name he had, and CIA will be gutted over there for the next five years, maybe longer.”

“We won’t even have anyone left over there to try to save the assets that Maines’s probably named,” Marshall added. “This is a death sentence for every last one of them. By the time we can get our case officers replaced, there won’t be anyone over there for them to talk to. Recruiting another stable of assets… no telling how long that will take.”

Menard nodded. “If my people could do this to the Russians and the moles they have in our government, we could give my counterintelligence units a six-month vacation after. It doesn’t get worse than this, Mr. President, and there’s no upside.” The man sounded morose.

“Oh, no, it does get worse. Kathy, tell Isaac what happened yesterday,” Rostow ordered.

She turned her head slightly toward the man, but didn’t look up. “Clark Barron brought two analysts to Berlin to help him figure out who assassinated General Stepan Strelnikov, who was one of our key recruitments. They developed a theory that General Arkady Lavrov, the GRU chairman, might have met with Strelnikov in the ruins of the old Soviet missile base at Vogelsang before Strelnikov died. They went out there to see if they could confirm that, and they did. They found evidence that Strelnikov was abducted at the old base commandant’s office. Acting on a hunch, they also visited one of the abandoned missile storage bunkers.” Cooke opened a binder and passed Menard a satellite photograph of the Vogelsang base, with labels identifying the buildings. “They also gathered evidence that Lavrov’s people had set up a test rig for an EMP weapon of some kind, probably as a demonstration for the Syrians who were in town earlier this week.”

“That’s bad news,” Menard noted. “They saw the weapon?”

“No,” Cooke admitted. She passed the rest of the binder across the table. Menard opened it and found a stack of the photographs Kyra had taken at the site. “But the test rig was still up and they found generators mounted inside one of the bunkers.”

She stopped talking for a moment and Menard looked up at the woman, feeling the weight of some piece of news yet to come. “The analysts were ambushed coming out of the bunker. It looks like Lavrov had sent a team back, possibly to break down the test rig and clean up the site. We don’t know. We suspect the men were Spetsnaz. The analysts ran for the woods and the Russians pursued them. Only one of the analysts made it back to the embassy.”

Menard looked at Cooke, then the men in the room. Marshall was making no effort to hide his anger. Cooke’s poker face was impressive, but Menard could see the woman was holding down sadder emotions that were threatening to break through. “And the other one?”

“He got separated from his partner by a concrete barrier,” Cooke reported. “She reports that he was shot by the Russians, how seriously we don’t know. He could be dead. He told her to keep running. She evaded capture and delivered her evidence to our people in Berlin.”

“You’re saying that Russian Special Forces may have killed a U.S. citizen on allied soil?” Menard asked.

“That’s what she’s saying,” Marshall confirmed. “Kidnapped him at best, murdered him at worst.”

Menard sat back, amazed and trying to process what he’d heard. “That’s insane. Have the Germans checked the site?”

“Yes,” Marshall answered. The DNI’s voice was quiet. “They didn’t find anything beyond some blood on the ground. The generators, the test rig, the evidence of Strelnikov’s abduction, it was all gone. The Russians cleaned house. If we didn’t have those pictures, we wouldn’t be able to prove a thing.”

“We still can’t prove a thing,” Cooke corrected him. “If we made these public, the Russians would just claim everything was staged or Photoshopped. Those wouldn’t be enough to nail Lavrov on anything.”

“We’re not going to go public with them,” Rostow announced. All heads turned toward the president. “Russian soldiers have attacked and possibly murdered a U.S. citizen on friendly soil to cover up some covert action. That’s not going to stand, especially not when they’re about to cut us open like a trout and probably kill a lot of their own people in the process. We’re going to talk to them about it in the language they can understand.” Rostow opened a folder on the table and passed a sheet of White House letterhead to the FBI director. “Isaac, as of today, I want the FBI to arrest every Russian on U.S. soil who your people ever dreamed might be an intelligence officer. I’m going to talk to the secretary of state and have him start pressing allied countries to do the same. I expect most of the Europeans won’t be much use, but the Brits and the Aussies will probably jump at the chance to kick the Russians where it hurts.”

“We’ll never be able to hold them,” Menard advised. “Most of them will be under diplomatic cover.”

“I’ll declare them persona non grata as fast as you can lock them up, and I don’t care if you put most of their embassy staff behind bars. I want tit for tat on this, and I don’t care what stories you have to make up about them to get it done,” Rostow countered. “Clark, I want your operators to start disrupting every Russian covert operation they know about, and I don’t want them to be subtle about it. I want Arkady Lavrov and anyone else over there who’s in bed with him to know why we’re dropping the mountain on them.”

“Sir, if I may,” Marshall interjected. “I don’t think escalating the situation is the right approach. We don’t have our own Alden Maines fingering every Russian intel officer in their embassy up on Wisconsin Avenue. So if we start trying to arrest them en masse, the ones we don’t get will know that their cover is intact. They get bolder in their operations than they are now, and we don’t know many other potential Maineses they might already be talking to.”

“What good is collecting intelligence if we’re going to let our enemies murder our people whenever they get the urge? And when our own people are just going to run over the border and tear us down whenever they get an itch?” Rostow asked. “Cy, I thought snakes stopped walking on two legs when the dinosaurs died out until I met the Russian president. The Syrians drop nail bombs and nerve gas on their own people, and he vetoes any statement of condemnation coming out of the UN just because he can. He sells guns to every butcher with a bank account and murders journalists at home when they dare to talk about it, and no one can touch him. He plays rough and then rubs our nose in it, and the world gets a happy laugh because we look feckless. Well, enough. I’m not going to sit here and look feckless. Am I understood?”

“Yes, sir,” the men replied. Silence ruled the room.

Cooke had said nothing. “Kathy, are you with me on this?” Rostow asked.

Cooke looked at the president, murder in her eyes. “We have our orders, don’t we?”

“I’d rather hear that you’re behind this. The Russians are about to cripple us, and they might have killed one of our own… one of yours. I would’ve thought that you’d want to hit them back.”

“More people will die if we do this, you know that,” Cooke said. She let the silence hang for a minute, then turned loose. “Mr. President, you don’t know what you’re saying when you call that missing analyst ‘one of my own,’ ” she told him. “And I don’t understand how you plan to define victory with this.” She held up the White House letterhead that Rostow had placed on the table. “After the Soviet Union fell, the Russian intelligence services practically fused with the mob. Organized crime is running that country, for all practical purposes, so this operation will look like mob warfare in Chicago in the twenties before it’s over. You’ll get your tit for tat, but it’ll be a one-way ratchet of violence and every turn of the handle will be greased with blood. And, with all due respect, Mr. President, I don’t think you’ve considered how we’re going to break the cycle once it starts. The Russians assassinate their dissidents abroad by feeding them radioactive poison, and they just shoot the ones at home. So if you’re not prepared to fight in the mud, it would be better to walk away now because the Russian security services like it down there.”

No one spoke. Rostow stared at the deputy DNI, frowning, but the woman refused to turn away. He saw pain in her eyes that he didn’t understand. It was rare that he let a rebuke go, but an instinct, a voice somewhere in his mind, told him to let this one go.

Rostow finally broke the silence that no one else would break. “Thank you for your views, everyone, but I’m not going to back away from this. I consider it one of my primary duties as president to protect our citizens abroad, and I want the Russians to know that they can’t just take out our people for free.” He turned to the men in the room. “I expect daily updates on this during my PDB briefings, understood?” There were nods and mutters of assent. The president of the United States closed the file on the table, and the meeting was over.

Rostow walked back to his desk as the subordinate stood. “Kathy, my people will need to coordinate with yours,” Menard said, his voice low.

“I’ll have the Counterintelligence Center contact them,” Cooke promised.

“You knew the analyst who got taken down by the Russians?” Menard asked.

“We were close. Leave it there.”

“Sure. I am sorry.”

Cooke nodded. “Thank you… but right now we need to figure out how to manage the damage control on this,” she said. Only old Navy discipline was keeping her mind focused on anything other than her grief. “Between Maines feeding the Russians the names of our assets in Moscow and an open ground war between CIA, the GRU, and the FSB, maybe the SVR too? We’ll be lucky if the Russians don’t burn our embassy down.”

“Yeah,” Menard agreed. “But it’ll take my people some time to get moving on this, maybe three days. If you can figure out a way to snuff this fuse by then, I’ll be a happy man. If not, you said it — we have our orders.”

“I’ll call you.”

“Nothing?” Kyra asked. She was sitting on the conference room table, hunched over, elbows resting on legs that were hanging over the side. Her stare was vacant and she’d hardly made eye contact with him for more than a day now. She was trying to keep it hidden, but Barron heard the anxiety in her voice. He was strangely relieved to hear it. It was the only emotion the woman had displayed since she’d returned alone from the Vogelsang base.

“The Germans swept Vogelsang over,” Barron told her. “The test site you reported was clean. They found a fair amount of blood where Jon went down, but nothing else.” It had been eighteen hours since the young woman had outrun the Spetsnaz.

“Did he bleed out?” she asked, her voice as empty as her eyes.

“They can’t tell,” Barron admitted. “The ground was still wet from the rain… they couldn’t tell how much blood might’ve soaked into the dirt.”

“No leads off that pistol?”

“I gave it to the Germans. The serial number was filed off and the ballistics on it didn’t match anything on file. I’m not surprised. Those Makarovs are the Russian version of the Saturday night special. They’re so common that just finding one doesn’t narrow down the field of suspects,” Barron reported. “And Lavrov is gone. The Bundeskriminalamt says he took off for Moscow this morning… took an embassy car to the airport and the plane had diplomatic protection too. Without any physical evidence tying him to a crime, the Germans didn’t feel they had enough evidence to even ask the Russian government to hold him in the country, much less withdraw his diplomatic immunity. Your testimony alone wasn’t enough to convince them.”

“Was Maines with him?”

“The Germans aren’t sure. Fifteen men traveled with Lavrov. He drove out to the airport in a caravan… one town car and two full-size vans. Maines could’ve been in one of them. The Russians do disguise work as well as we do,” Barron said. “But the Germans couldn’t even get a good look inside the hangar, much less the people or cargo he took with him. They don’t know who or what Lavrov loaded onto his plane before it took off.”

Kyra nodded. “What now?”

Barron sat down next to the younger woman, tempted to put his hand on her back. He refrained, not knowing how she would interpret the gesture. He couldn’t tell if she was hiding her emotions, or simply had no energy left to feel anything at all. “We go home.”

“What?”

Barron offered her a sheet of paper. “We got a cable from Langley. Maines gave up the name of everyone in Moscow Station, every single one. And the Russians figured out that I was Agency a long time ago, so I can’t get in there. POTUS has ordered the FBI and the DNI to hit the Russians back,” he said. “The Bureau has an open season on every Russian intel officer on U.S. soil, no bag limit. The DNI wants us to disrupt every Russian covert op we know of. Sounds like POTUS wants his own covert spy war.”

He expected an explosion from her, some loud expression of satisfaction. Kyra reacted not at all as she read the paper. “My name isn’t on here.”

“Makes sense,” Barron said with a shrug. “You were never assigned to Moscow Station. What’s it matter?” He was sure that he would find the answer disturbing, no matter what it was.

“I could go in. I’m not on Maines’s list.”

“Not a chance,” Barron observed. “Maines knows who you are, and I’m sure Lavrov has your picture from the surveillance cameras at the embassy.”

“I was in disguise. I can wear a different one going into Moscow.”

Barron shook his head. “Even if you could get in, what’s the point? In twenty-four hours, there won’t be anyone in Moscow who can help you,” he protested. “You couldn’t possibly save all of our assets over there by yourself. You’d be lucky if you could get to any one of them before the FSB or Lavrov’s people did. The Russians have thousands of counterintelligence and security officers. And you don’t know the exfiltration plans for any of our assets even if you could get to them.”

“We can’t just walk,” Kyra said, her voice quiet and flat. She lifted her head and looked at the clandestine service director.

“Three years in the Red Cell has messed with your head. You’d be lucky to stay out of Lubyanka or whatever other hole the Russians use these days,” Barron said after a moment’s thought. “I can’t begin to count all of the things that could go wrong. You have no plan, you would have no close support. The losses we’re going to take are bad enough. I’m not in the habit of giving the Russians freebies.”

“That’s exactly what we’d be giving them. We stand back and Lavrov just takes out all of those assets for free,” Kyra countered. “And then he’ll have a clear road for the next decade to keep giving away stealth technology and nuclear weapons designs and EMP bombs. Maybe the Brits or the Israelis will shut some of it down, but they don’t have the resources to go after the GRU everywhere on the planet.”

“Nice argument. That’s not why you want to go.”

“No, it’s not,” Kyra admitted after a long silence, her voice quiet.

“So why?”

The woman turned her head away from the senior officer. “Lavrov and those Spetsnaz soldiers are the only ones who know what happened to Jon.” Kyra stared down at the floor, then looked back up at Barron. “I know that the mission always comes first,” she admitted. “I know that you would never approve a mission like this just to find out whether Jon’s still alive. But he saved my life, last year, in Venezuela. I infiltrated that base where the Iranians were building their bomb. But their security came out, sweeping the buildings, and I was about to get overrun. Jon was up in the hills and he held off a whole regiment of soldiers with a sniper rifle, one of those big .50-caliber monsters that you use to destroy trucks and equipment.” Kyra’s gaze was distant, like the memory she was describing was playing out on the wall in front of her. She smiled for the first time in days, amused at something only she could see. “He refused to shoot anybody… made a good show of killing jeeps, though. Steam and oil spraying everywhere. But he wouldn’t kill anyone. He’d done that before, in Iraq during the war, and it still haunted him, so he refused to do it again. Probably saved the president from an international mess, too… but he could handle that rifle… ended up in a snipers’ gunfight a day later with an Iranian Special Forces soldier. Jon was amazing.”

The personal movie of her memory ended and Kyra’s focus returned to the room. She looked at Barron, focused on his face again. “I have to know what happened to him. If they did kill Jon and we don’t try something, they’ll never pay for it, and…” She stopped to force back a sob. It took her much longer than she’d expected, almost a minute. Barron refused to break the silence. “… and how am I supposed to live with that?”

“You’ll learn.”

“How can you know that?”

Barron smiled, rueful. “I was chief of Moscow Station years ago. You ever hear how my tour ended?” Kyra shook her head. “I was running a night op with one of my officers, Manuela Saconi. I was driving. We were going to use a jack-in-the-box so she could bail out to meet an asset. The FSB had a bug up its butt about something and we drew three cars that night. One of them was aggressive… got right up on our rear quarter. The driver had to swerve for I-don’t-know-what, turned right into us, and spun me out. Our car rolled, I don’t know, five or six times. Ellie died on the scene, massive head trauma, even with her seat belt and airbag. I ended up in a Russian hospital, concussion, major laceration on my scalp. They found the jack-in-the-box in the wreckage. Kathy Cooke’s predecessor worked out a deal with the FSB to keep it all quiet. The Agency recalled me and the Kremlin never declared me persona non grata and made sure the local news never covered the story. Ellie got shipped home and was buried before I ever left the hospital in Moscow. But I was furious. I wanted the Russians to apologize, to admit they’d screwed up. Took me a long time, but I realized that wasn’t going to happen. I came to see it was for the best… that took longer. It’s a funny game. The other side screws up and we help them save face, because if we don’t, they’ll do it anyway by coming after our people and making a big show when they catch one.”

“But if Jon’s alive—”

“If he’s alive, you’ll never get near him,” Barron told her, his voice soft. “You’ll never even get the Russians to admit they’ve got him. They’d be confessing to the illegal rendition and detention of a U.S. citizen, not that we have the moral high ground on that score anymore. They’d probably kill him and you both before they’d admit it if you did find out he was still alive. So you go in and you might die sooner than you think.”

Kyra turned her head away from him. “Even if I can’t find him, somebody needs to work the EMP problem. We need to find out where it is, where it’s going, how Lavrov is going to deliver it—”

“That’s not our problem—”

“Yes, it is. Jon was the one who figured out that Lavrov is selling strategic technologies. We’re the only ones who have the whole picture. Sure, the Israelis might catch the EMP coming into Syria, but Lavrov will still be running loose. He’ll keep selling the tech and there will always be a buyer out there—”

“And how do you think you’re going to stop the head of the GRU from running a global covert op?” Barron pronounced the letters of the acronym slow and precise. “That’s like one Russian case officer trying to take on the whole CIA.”

“Maybe, but when you think about it, we do that all the time. We’re all really on our own when we’re on the street anyway. We plan things out, talk through radios, sometimes tell each other to go this way or that, but when the plan comes apart, it’s one officer against a whole country, running for a safe house,” Kyra observed, not really talking to him. “I’ve always made it to the safe house. I can do it again.”

Barron frowned. “You want to be station chief Moscow that bad?”

“You can keep the title. I just want to get reimbursed for my travel expenses.”

Barron smiled. It was a small joke, but he would take whatever emotion he could get from her. “You’re insane. You really are.”

“No, I’m just motivated. But you can demote me when I get home if it makes you feel better.”

“Oh, you’re not the one who’ll have to worry about getting demoted,” he said. “If you make it out, we’ll both be heroes. If you don’t, the president will execute me in the Langley courtyard for letting you go.”

That earned him a small laugh from the woman. “So… dead or heroes. Isn’t that what we really signed up for when we took this job anyway?”

“Here’s the safe house,” Barron said, his finger pointing to a street on the Moscow map. “We just set this one up a few months ago, so if there’s one that Maines doesn’t have on some list, it’s that one. Case the place before you go in. Don’t assume it’s clean. If it is, chances are good you’ll have the place as long as you want it, but sanitize the place first so the locals won’t find anything sensitive in case they do show up on short notice.”

“And if it’s not clean?” Kyra asked.

“Then you turn around and you come home. I want you to play this one by the rules all the way. But if it comes apart, whatever you do, don’t run for the embassy. The FSB has the place under surveillance at all times. You’ll never get to the front gate if they’re looking for you.”

Kyra stared at the map, repeating the address that Barron had scribbled on it until she’d etched the Russian words in her mind. “Any ideas about which assets I should try to contact when I get in-country?”

Barron held out his hand, a folded note between his fingers. Kyra took it, unfolded it. The list was short, scribbled out by hand in cryptic notes on a sheet of flash paper, nitrocellulose that she could immolate in a fraction of a second with the Zippo lighter that Barron had set on the table. “That’s it?”

“That’s all the ones that I’m going to give you,” Barron replied. “They’re the only ones inside the GRU who I think would be in a position to know about any sales of strategic technologies that Lavrov is brokering.” There were only three names, but it was, at that moment, possibly the most sensitive document the CIA had in its possession. Even with Maines in their hands, the Russian government still would have murdered anyone in its path to retrieve it without a moment’s thought. “If we’re lucky, he might have forgotten or withheld some names, and I’m not about to help him fill in any of the blanks. But if he copied everything onto a thumb drive instead of relying on his memory, chances are pretty good that you’ll never get near any of them before Lavrov takes them out. So don’t try to contact any of them unless you’re ready to bet your life that Lavrov’s people aren’t watching. You take no chances at all, you got me?”

“I should have a few more possibles, in case I can’t reach these,” Kyra protested. “The Russians can’t watch everyone.”

“Moscow Rules — you assume that they can. You won’t have the time or the resources to focus on anyone else anyway. I don’t know how many names Maines might be giving up, but we have to assume he’s going to give up all of them. There’s no way to even know in what order he might go after them, so we have to assume he’ll want to take them all down as fast as he can. The real question is whether the FSB will play ball. If they do, you’ll never get to any of them. If they don’t, you might have a short window.”

“Why wouldn’t the FSB cooperate?” Kyra asked. “They handle counterintelligence in Russia.”

Barron nodded. “They do, but the FSB director is Anatoly Grigoriyev, and he and Lavrov hate each other. Grigoriyev was KGB back in the eighties, Lavrov was Soviet army intelligence and they were both stationed in Berlin when the Wall fell. They stepped on each other’s toes plenty in the aftermath. It’s an old professional rivalry turned personal. There’s nothing either man would love more than to get the other kicked out of the Kremlin.”

Kyra grunted quietly. “That might explain why Lavrov lured Strelnikov to Berlin. He was Lavrov’s boy, so it would make sense that Lavrov wouldn’t want Grigoriyev to find out about that particular breach until he’d solved the problem.”

“Agreed,” Barron replied. “That sounds to me like Lavrov doesn’t want the FSB to know what he’s doing. A major GRU operation to take down Maines’s entire list of our assets in short order would be impossible to keep quiet. The FSB would hear about it and someone would start asking questions. That’s probably your only prayer of getting to any of these people. Lavrov might be taking his time, working down the list nice and slow so he doesn’t aggravate Grigoriyev more than necessary. But if Lavrov is looking to plug his own leaks first, these people could be at the top of the list.”

Kyra tried to find some weakness in his logic and failed. “Yeah,” she agreed. “And if Lavrov hates Grigoriyev that much, he could get a lot of leverage over Grigoriyev by releasing the rest of Maines’s list to the Kremlin once his own holes are plugged. Watching the GRU identify moles in the FSB would probably finish him.”

“True,” Barron agreed. “And since Lavrov would be the one who cleaned house, he would probably get veto power over the next pick for FSB director after Grigoriyev takes up residence in the gulag. And then there would be no reason not to wrap up everyone on the bottom of the list at once. So all of these people might be dead anyway a lot sooner than we thought.” There was bitterness in his voice.

These were his people, Kyra realized. We’re going to lose all of these people on his watch. She wondered how many of the Russian assets had been recruited when Barron had been the Moscow station chief.

The room fell silent. Kyra picked up the list, read it through three times, then opened the Zippo and spun the flint, igniting the tiny fire. She touched it to the flash paper and it vaporized before she could even open her fingers.

“It’s oh-five-hundred. You should get moving,” Barron advised.

“Just give me a minute, okay?”

“Don’t be long.”

Barron marched out of the room. Kyra leaned forward, resting her folded arms on the table, and she laid her head on them, suddenly more tired than she could ever remember being. You should have stayed with me, Jon, stayed behind the wall, she thought. I need your help, old man. A flood of anxiety rushed into her chest. She fought it down, but the horrifying thought that maybe, just maybe, she was wrong about everything refused to leave her.

Kyra evicted the thoughts, ignored the angry doubts in her chest, and held herself together long enough to fetch her bag from the hotel. Ten minutes after, she was sitting next to Barron in a SUV, pulling out onto the road for the airport. Kyra watched the Berlin embassy recede and wondered again whether she shouldn’t give up the fight.

There were seats for more than twenty-five around the long table, but the real governing quorum numbered far fewer and most of them were not present today.

Anatoly Maksimovich Grigoriyev had never pined for the old Soviet Union, but the room had always struck the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) as too ostentatious, a showpiece that sent the wrong message to the Russian people when the cameras were on. National security was not a subject to be discussed in a place like this. Too soft, he thought, too indulgent. The people should have seen them meet in a war room, a Spartan place with few comforts that would portray an image of sacrifice and resolve. The floor was dark wood with a geometric parquet pattern running through it. Square columns of dark marble topped with gold capitals stood out against the brown and cream colors that dominated the rest of the room. The front of the room displayed the Russian coat of arms, the two-headed dragon, gold with a red shield mounted high on the wall and flanked on each side by the country’s flags. The crowning irony of the place was an ornate chandelier above the table that could have been at home in a czar’s palace.

But the cameras were not on, not this time. There were four men in the room and the subject of the meeting was not for anyone’s ears but theirs. The president of the Russian Federation, a former FSB director himself, sat at the table’s head. The foreign minister and Arkady Lavrov sat to his right. Grigoriyev was quite sure that his position alone on the left side was symbolic.

“Good afternoon, friends,” the president said. Polite responses were uttered. “I believe that we are here at your request, Anatoly?”

“Yes, but I don’t need to tell any of you why I have asked to meet, I am sure,” Grigoriyev replied.

“Then there is nothing to discuss, Anatoly,” Lavrov said. “The GRU does not answer—”

“The FSB is responsible for the internal security of the state,” Grigoriyev continued, cutting Lavrov off midsentence. “We perform the counterintelligence mission on Russian soil. This is not in dispute. Therefore, I want to know why I was not informed that the GRU had a source inside the CIA that provided a list of all CIA officers currently in Moscow.”

“Obviously, for reasons of operational security,” Lavrov replied. “Our source is a sensitive one. We could not risk exposing him by sharing the information with the FSB in advance of the announcement.”

“There should have been no announcement without consulting me first!” Grigoriyev protested. “And I want to know why our foreign minister cooperated with Arkady in withholding that information while he instructed our ambassador to Washington to tell the U.S. president that we would be expelling all of those officers from our soil.” In truth, Grigoriyev already knew the answer. The foreign minister was a Lavrov protégé. Grigoriyev simply wanted to see whether the man would have the good sense to appear embarrassed that he’d allowed the GRU chairman to co-opt his ministry so easily. It seemed he did. The minister avoided Grigoriyev’s gaze and remained silent.

The president came to his defense. “Anatoly, I think the greater question here is why the GRU had to do the FSB’s duty?”

“Are you accusing me of incompetence?” Grigoriyev countered. “You were the FSB director once, you understand that the CIA is not a club of amateurs. Even in the old days, when we were the KGB and recruited Americans abroad, we never had a source who gave up so much at once. I do not know who this source is, but I doubt very much that Arkady recruited him. No, this is not incompetence on the part of my people. I think it is merely good fortune, a volunteer who came to Arkady’s doorstep.”

“That does not matter,” Lavrov said, dismissive. “How the man became our asset does not change the fact that such a source must be protected. You have seen the list of people we have expelled. You know that everyone you suspected was a CIA officer was on it, and many more who you did not.”

“Protected?” Grigoriyev snorted in derision. “Do you truly imagine that the Americans do not know exactly who your source is now? And if you are wrong about him being a genuine defector?” Grigoriyev asked. “How have you verified this source and his information? What if he is lying? Do you realize what you have done if this all proves to be falsehoods?”

“It is not—”

“Open the file to me so that I can verify that for myself,” Grigoriyev demanded.

Lavrov exhaled in mock exasperation and shook his head in a display of equally false sympathy. “I think that you are simply concerned that you were made to look the fool, Anatoly,” he said. “The GRU has earned the glory that you think should belong to the FSB and now you want a share of something you haven’t earned.”

“What I want is the opportunity for my people to fulfill their duty to protect the Rodina and her interests,” Grigoriyev retorted. He turned toward the Russian president. “How can we be sure that this asset was not a dangle or a double agent if we cannot see the file? If that is the case, then expelling all of those Americans will have been a terrible blunder—”

“How so?” the president asked, clearly not interested in the answer.

“The Americans will surely respond in kind. They will expel any number of our people from the United States and disrupt our operations there. If the names that Arkady was given were not, in fact, all CIA officers and merely some easily replaced consular officers, then we could suffer more damage than the Americans—”

“That will not be the case,” Lavrov assured the president. “My asset’s information is reliable. By tomorrow evening, the CIA will not have a single officer left on Moscow’s soil. They know that we know their identities and none of them will risk arrest and imprisonment by staying. Yes, they will certainly expel some of our people from their country, but not so many. With no comparable asset, they could only guess at who our officers are. Unless they are prepared to expel our entire delegation, which would be unthinkable except in war, whatever damage they inflict on us will be less than what we have done to them, so we will be able to reconstitute our operations more quickly. We will have a significant advantage in intelligence operations for at least a decade to come.”

“I must agree, Anatoly,” the Russian president said. “Do not let your old competition with Arkady blind you to the opportunity that this source presented us. The information that Arkady has given us is truly impressive. We could not wait.”

“We could not wait?” Grigoriyev said. “Then you knew also?”

“Of course.”

“This is foolishness,” Grigoriyev groused, the winds sucked neatly from his sails.

“Such sour grapes, Anatoly.” Lavrov smiled. “For now, I think it would be helpful to us all if the FSB could ensure that all of the Americans on the list have left the Rodina, and I would consider it the greatest of personal favors if you would inform me when their exodus is complete.”

I am not a bootlicker, like the foreign minister there, Grigoriyev raged quietly in his mind. You would throw me crumbs and say I should be grateful for them?

The FSB director shook his head in disgust. The meeting really had been a formality after all. He should have seen it. Lavrov and his lackey would not have expelled so many Americans without the president’s approval. The fact that they had not told him in advance told Grigoriyev where he stood with this group. The path to the president’s chair always had gone through the FSB and its predecessor, the KGB. Now Lavrov’s good fortune had given the GRU chairman a way to steer that river out of its course.

How to steer it back? Grigoriyev asked himself. He did not have an answer now, he admitted, but a solution would present itself. It always had.

“You are not serious,” Cooke said. Years of practice had taught her to keep her tone calm and measured, especially when the world was burning, but she wanted to scream at her subordinate, tell him in profane terms what she thought about the man’s admission. Instead, she gripped the secure phone in her hand and tried to crush it, giving her anger somewhere to go besides her mouth.

“You know better,” Barron replied. “She wants to know what happened to Jon. You and I would want to do the same.”

“Wanting to do something and actually doing it are very, very different things,” Cooke observed. “And the president has ordered everyone out. I’m going to have to tell him that we’re actually sending somebody in. He won’t take it well.” She was being overly polite. She would be fortunate if the man didn’t throw the Oval Office Churchill bust at her.

“Not to split hairs, but he ordered everyone on Lavrov’s list out,” Barron replied. “She’s not on the list. And she’s got cover for action… we really do need someone to sanitize that last safe house. We didn’t have enough time to clean them out before everyone had to leave, and that’s not a lie.”

“What if Maines gave those up to Lavrov?” Cooke asked.

“He might have,” Barron admitted. “I’ve got the Counterintelligence Center checking to see whether he went hunting through those files.”

“That’s something,” Cooke conceded. “Okay, she’s in Moscow. The question is what we can do to support her?”

“Not much.”

“This isn’t a good idea,” Cooke observed.

“Probably not,” Barron finally conceded. “But it’s time we stopped being reactive and started getting ahead of the game. Defense is the art of losing slow, and Maines and Lavrov have been in charge from the start of this. At the very least, we need to start throwing some sand in their gears and slowing them down while we figure out how to get in front of this. If there’s one thing Stryker is good at, it’s wrecking the best-laid plains.”

Cooke didn’t know whether to nod or shake her head.

Sokolov’s secure phone rang. He answered it, waiting the few seconds for the encryption to go live. “Ya slushayu vas.”

“Anton Semyonovich.” It was Lavrov’s voice.

“General,” Sokolov answered, “I stand ready at your service.”

“I have the first name for you,” Lavrov told him. “When can you move on him?”

“At first light, General. The men are here. We will need a few hours to plan the operation. We do not want to give the man any opportunity to slip the net.”

“Very good.” Lavrov gave him the traitor’s name and where he worked. Sokolov’s eyes went wide. The man’s office was not a thousand yards away. “Report to me when he is in your custody, and then when you have resolved the matter. I will then have another name for you.”

“Understood, General.” The line died and Sokolov replaced the headset on its cradle. He stared at the name. And why did you turn against the Rodina? he wondered. He’d studied traitors and their motivations, the better to do his work. There were always so many reasons, but so few noble ones. I pray that you are a noble one, he thought. Perhaps then you will see your death as a fitting end to a life well lived.