The Fall of Moscow Station

CHAPTER SIX

She’d spent the flight declining the flight attendant’s polite questions regarding food and beverages using only hand signals. Kyra couldn’t understand what the flight crew was saying and didn’t want to make a request for English that would’ve announced to the entire plane that she was an American. She honestly did not know whether any of the people around her worked for the Russian security services and the case officer decided that now was as good a time as any to start being paranoid.

She looked out the window as the plane began to descend through the clouds. Moscow looked like any other city at night from the air. Kyra indulged her imagination for a few seconds and let herself think she was landing at Dulles. She and Jon would disembark, say goodbye in the baggage claim. A short walk to the parking garage, load her bag into her truck, and she would be home in Leesburg within a half hour—

— but Jon was not here. The pilot’s announcement in Russian to prepare for landing fully destroyed the illusion without mercy, not least because Kyra didn’t understand a single word.

A sharp wind struck the aircraft sideways and the plane yawed hard just feet off the runway. The pilot held the altitude until he could straighten out the nose. Kyra inhaled deeply when the plane’s tires touched the concrete. Not the best start, she thought.

She was relieved that she was alone. Half of counterintelligence work was making connections between people and places, and Kyra was free of any here. She was a completely random element as far as the Russians were concerned. If they targeted her simply because she was an American, they would break themselves trying to find any clue that connected her to any of the case officers or assets Maines had revealed. There was nothing for them to connect, and that was the only way to play the game against the FSB, the GRU, and all the rest. The CIA had learned through sad experience that mistakes were small when the Russians were playing at their best, and one could never assume that the Russians were at less than their best. That was the first of the cardinal Moscow Rules.

She had no doubt that she would be breaking several of those rules before this was over, and she was sure she needn’t have bothered learning the last one. Harass the Russians? She couldn’t imagine what case officer would be so stupid even with a full CIA in support to pull them out of trouble. But someone had. Rules were never made until someone had done something that called them into being. Kyra wondered whether the FSB had bashed the offender’s face against the asphalt to teach him some humility. She wouldn’t have faulted them.

The customs officer was disinterested in the American woman to the point of incivility. The lack of attention, forged documents, and her light disguise — this one changing her into a dark redhead, flat-chested, with wide hips and a round face — granted her admittance into the country without getting called into a private room for a special interview.

Kyra had settled on her method of reaching the safe house before leaving Berlin. Drivers for hire were lined up near the rental car desks. She’d considered one. She didn’t read Cyrillic and the Russians’ refusal to post English highway signs or obey their own traffic laws was going to make navigation problematic. But the Moscow Rules decreed that everyone is potentially under opposition control and she wasn’t going to give herself to the FSB or the GRU so quickly. The embassy would have its own fleet of vehicles, but improvisation was going to be the order of the day for this operation and having a car the Russians didn’t associate with diplomats would prove useful.

The Russian government allowed foreigners staying less than six months to use their own countries’ driver’s licenses so long as they had a notarized Russian translation attached. Both were forgeries. The Russian police were known to stop drivers here for no reason at all, but she could risk that. An expert would have been hard-pressed to detect fake documents of this quality. No local traffic cop would manage it standing on the road with his own eyes the only tools at his disposal.

The Volkswagen Tiguan was the last SUV available at the Avis rental desk, and the most expensive transport they had, but Kyra was sure that Langley wasn’t going to quibble over prices. Barron’s checkbook was open for this trip, which was no small favor. The Tiguan was going to swallow petrol like a parched bull drinking water from the trough on a hot Virginia day, but if Kyra was going to risk surveillance and detention by one of the most efficient intelligence services in the world, she wanted a car with four-wheel drive and as much horsepower as she could buy. She’d been chased before. She knew better than to lose one of those races by choosing an underpowered car that was useless off the paved roads.

She’d memorized the major roads leading into the city on the map in her pack, but she paid for the GPS unit anyway. She didn’t know whether the FSB could track it, but if her memory failed her, she wasn’t going to spend the next week driving the Moscow streets, hoping to stumble across the safe house. To be fair, that level of incompetence might actually convince them that she was not a spy.

Kyra dropped the handle on her rolling bag, tossed it into the passenger seat, and started the Tiguan. She put her hand on the drive lever and pulled it down, then looked at her dashboard to make sure the truck was in reverse.

The gauges were labeled in Cyrillic.

This is not a good idea.

Kyra exhaled in exasperation as she heard Jon chiding her in her mind. That warning had become his habit and she supposed that he’d never been wrong, technically, despite her successes. Even fools were owed a few victories, she supposed, but she was finally coming to see the truth of his adage that bravery was no substitute for wisdom. If there was any operation that would settle the question, it would be this one. The Russian military may have degraded in the years after the Soviet Union had dissolved, but the security services never had. They had changed names and shapes, allegiances and org charts… no, in truth they had become the Kremlin, with only the blurred lines between them and organized crime to confuse that fact.

You shouldn’t have come here, Jon’s voice told her.

God hates a coward, she told him yet again in her mind.

Jon hadn’t been a coward. Gonna make you proud, old man, she decided.

Kyra put the truck in gear and drove out of the rental lot onto the airport road.

The safe house was twenty-five miles from the airport, but Kyra’s surveillance detection route had taken four hours to drive. She’d watched the safe house for another two before deciding it was unwatched and undisturbed, but she was still worried the FSB was simply more patient than she was.

She’d cursed in amazement when she saw it. The last safe house she’d seen had been a small apartment in a Caracas slum. This one was a mansion by Moscow standards. A hand-cut stone walkway curved around on a trim green lawn with shade trees and streetlamps for illumination. The exterior of the house was yellow with white brick at the corners and Roman columns that reached up two stories at the front door. A two-car garage connected at a right angle on the side. A black iron fence and high bushes surrounded the property. The estate would not have been out of place in one of the nicer neighborhoods of Loudoun County in northern Virginia, where she lived almost five thousand miles to the west. Kyra was sure that she’d driven off course somewhere, not believing the Agency’s largesse extended so far, until the front gate accepted the code Barron had given her in Berlin and moved aside for her truck.

How do they maintain cover on this place? She knew better than to ask such questions aloud back at headquarters.

She parked the Tiguan in the garage and closed that door by hand, hiding the vehicle, then pulled her luggage out of the passenger seat and entered the house by the mudroom door. The building was mostly hidden from the street by darkness, distance, and the bushes, but Barron had counseled her to stay indoors anyway.

The door leading into the house from the mudroom was locked. It looked nondescript, but the locks were heavy and the door and frame both were reinforced with steel.

There was a keypad by the door, twelve black squares with no labels. She pressed a button and the squares lit up, each with a number assigned in random order. No doubt the numbers would be in a different order the next time she came in. The system was designed to prevent anyone from deciphering the entry code by watching the user enter it from a distance and guessing the numbers by following the movement of the hand.

Kyra entered the second code that Barron had given her and the door clicked open.

The mudroom connected with the kitchen, long shadows stretching out on the hardwood floor as the sun moved down behind the bush line. Kyra stopped and listened, not moving for almost a full minute and hearing nothing. She found it strange, but she was grateful that the safe house would be empty. Otherwise, some caretaker would have asked her to nazovite sebya with some Russian pass phrase she would have mangled even if Barron had taught it to her hours before.

The Caracas safe house had been a tiny, ugly little space, barely eight hundred square feet with old furnishings, rusting gas heaters, and mold growing in the corners. This house was enormous by comparison, five thousand square feet spread across three levels, the entire space clean, the furnishings modern. A library on the main floor was stocked with both Russian and English books, and the kitchen had better equipment than Kyra’s own home in Virginia. The refrigerator was empty, but the pantry and cabinets had enough canned goods to keep her fed for weeks.

Dinner was instant polenta, which she found in the pantry and cooked on the stove. Kyra was no brilliant chef, but her mother had insisted that her daughter could not call herself a proper southern girl if she didn’t know how to make a bowl of grits. It was likely the only taste of home she would get here, but it did nothing to soothe her dark spirits. There was an unsettled feeling in the quiet darkness that the comfort food could not dispel and Kyra wondered whether the spirits of dead case officers or assets might not be keeping her company. There seemed to be voices in her head that were not her own.

The light outside had only minutes left before dying and the house seemed to be closing in, getting smaller as the rooms she could see from the table grew darker. She had kept the lights to a minimum, lest the house attract attention, but now she found herself reconsidering the tactic. Kyra had been alone on missions before, never minded it, but none had ever felt like this. Jon had always been at the other end of a phone if she’d needed him. Not tonight.

That’s not true, is it? she thought.

Kyra pushed herself away from the table, leaving the dirty bowl and fork to dry, and wandered to the staircase. She walked through the empty hall and found what she was looking for behind the last door on the left, also reinforced. The encrypted phone was stored in a cabinet with a digital lock along with other tools of her trade.

It was a satellite phone, like the one she’d used in Venezuela when that mission had gone sour, but a newer model. She assembled the antenna and worked out which window to point it where it could find a U.S. satellite hung in geostationary orbit. She worked out the interface and began to dial.

The call connected, encrypted, and the phone on the other end rang four times. She knew that no one was going to pick it up. Finally, the Agency voicemail system took over.

“This is Jon. Leave a message and I might get back to you, but probably not. I hate phones and the odds are good that you’re not important enough to make me want to use one. So either come see me in person or I’m going to assume whatever you want isn’t worth my time. If you were able to track down my number, you can find my vault too.”

She’d pestered him into recording a message and that was the one he’d settled on, his own bit of revenge on her coercion.

The answering service sounded the usual tone, and Kyra had to suppress a laugh, lest it be recorded for posterity. She wondered if the Agency or the National Archives kept the voicemails of officers killed in the line of duty.

She called his phone again and listened to the man’s voice a second time, smiling as she heard the familiar exasperation in his voice. Kyra disconnected without saying anything, then called a third time, committing his voice to memory as best she could. Jon’s dismissive insult to humanity ended once again, the tone sounded, and Kyra cut the call and powered down the unit.

The depression invaded her spirit again as soon as the LED display went black, leaving her sitting in the near darkness. Kyra knew how to fight that, a lesson she’d learned over the last few years.

She opened herself up to anger, letting the hatred for the Russians inside steel her spine. Lavrov was the reason Jon wasn’t here, and only he knew whether her mentor was alive or dead and whether an EMP was bound for Syria. Therefore, Kyra needed to connect with someone inside Lavrov’s operation.

The flash paper was inside the desk under the computer. Kyra retrieved the notepad, made her way back to the kitchen, and took her seat at the table again. It was two minutes’ work to re-create the list of asset names, contact methods, and locations that she’d memorized in Berlin.

She stared down at the asset list. There were three names.

Who do I contact first?

Adolf Viktorovich Topilin, Foundation electrical engineer. Maybe one of the EMP designers? If so, he could confirm its existence… maybe even provide the specs. She was impressed that Barron and his people had been able to recruit a weapons engineer. After the Agency had lost Adolf Tolkachev a few decades before, the Russians had put the screws to every other engineer with access to sensitive designs. The FSB and GRU still knew how to instill fear in the masses when they needed to. Lavrov’s engineers inside the Foundation likely wanted to avoid the very appearance of talking to foreigners, lest the security services imagine they were taking a recruitment pitch.

It was full dark outside now, the only light on in the house being the small lamp suspended above the kitchen table. The house creaked somewhere, but Kyra refused to let paranoia creep into her thoughts. If the Russians were going to come in, they would not be subtle about it. She cleared her mind, then stared at the list again, trying to order her thoughts.

Major Elizaveta Igoryevna Puchkov, GRU liaison to the Foundation, logistics specialist. Logistics for what? Kyra wondered. Acquiring resources for the Foundation? Or helping the Foundation move its cargo around? Both? Barron had not told her. She considered calling him on the secure sat phone upstairs to ask, but decided against it. If Lavrov had moved an EMP to Berlin for a demonstration, Puchkov would be the best one in a position to know… and if Lavrov had flown Jon or Maines back from Berlin, she’d be the best chance to find that out too.

Even if she did know, what could Kyra do about it? What good was information if she couldn’t act on it? She cursed herself for going down that path and set that pessimism aside. Worry about that when the time comes.

Colonel Semyon Petrovich Zhitomirsky, GRU budget director. Always follow the money, Kyra thought. The money trail could tell an analyst more about what an organization was doing than anything else. Zhitomirsky might not have specifics about any one project, but knowing where the rubles were flowing could at least point Kyra in the right direction. The moneymen always knew where the bodies were buried, even if they didn’t know which exact bodies they were. Save him for last, she thought. The other two seemed more likely to have specific information she could put to immediate use. She would have to search the computer upstairs, see if the encrypted hard drive contained any information that would help her decide.

Which one to start? Kyra wondered.

Adolf Viktorovich Topilin had stolen his wife’s car for this trip. She would be furious when he returned, but her red Ford Mondeo was faster than his own humble Lada Priora. How he would explain to her that they were leaving the country, not to return, he didn’t know. She didn’t know about his treason and Topilin wasn’t sure that Nina would even come with him once he told her. In fact, he believed that she would call the FSB once he told her. He’d considered not telling her at all, just leaving her to the FSB when they came to the house. But he did still love her, even if her affections were far more tenuous than his. He had to give her the chance to come with him, if only to settle his own conscience.

One problem at a time, he told himself. His need for more time outweighed the suffering she would lay on him, and he spurred the car along the forest road much faster than was safe. The trees had combined into a single brown wall that he hardly saw out of the corner of his eye. If a boar or deer crossed into the road, his brakes would not stop the car in time to save the car or the animal. He sped on anyway, but it seemed self-defeating. The faster he went, the more time was stretching out, like Einstein had predicted. The closer he came to the dacha, the farther away it seemed to be and the trip never ended.

He pressed on. Topilin needed to burn the contents of the box and he couldn’t do it safely at home. The dacha was the only place for it.

The news of the government’s decision to evict so many diplomats from the country by itself had been frightful. Such things were rare and usually reserved for spies caught in the very act of plying their trade. It was not possible the FSB had caught so many CIA officers at once. How, then, had they decided who to expel? Were they all spies? Was the Kremlin merely lashing out at random? It seemed unlikely. There had been no rumors among his GRU coworkers of any kind of confrontation with the Main Enemy, as they still called the U.S., that would lead to mass expulsion. A secret source, then? Some GRU asset who had fingered the CIA’s forces in the Rodina? And if such a source could access that kind of information, could he not also identify the moles working for the Agency?

That concern had cost Topilin his night’s sleep, and his wife had questioned whether he was contracting the flu. He’d denied it, not wanting her to pressure him to stay home from work. Absence might create suspicion, would it not? So he’d risen at the usual hour, trying to hide his anxiety by speaking to his wife as little as possible. He’d shaved, showered, consumed a breakfast of sausage, black bread, and blacker tea. Then his telephone had sounded… not his cell phone, but the landline in his home.

“Ya slushayu vas,” he’d answered.

“You are Adolf Viktorovich Topilin?” the voice had asked him.

“Da.”

“They are coming for you,” the voice had said. “The GRU knows that you are a traitor. You will leave now if you value your life.” The call had ended there, with Topilin looking at the phone, terror in his soul like he’d never known in all his life. He’d gathered every bit of equipment the CIA had ever given him, thrown it into a box, and loaded it all into the trunk of his wife’s car while ignoring her fearful questions and protests.

Topilin pressed the pedal harder and the Mondeo protested, but obeyed.

The irony was that the Mondeo would have been beyond his means to buy had he not been a traitor to his country. His CIA handler had warned him against spending the money and making a show of affluence that he could not explain away, but Adolf Topilin’s wife was a relentless woman in her tastes. She had never been happy with the salary the GRU paid him, no matter how high he had climbed. The Russian military was not a generous employer except to its highest leaders and Topilin knew he would never reach those exalted heights. He lacked the personal connections to get such promotions and appointments. In the end, he knew that he would have to leave his job or find some other income to satisfy Nina, or she might leave him for some wealthier man.

But he was an electrical engineer for the Foundation for Advanced Research, had been since its founding, and the Central Intelligence Agency had been happy to give him that outside income in exchange for information. Three years of deliveries to his handler combined with compound interest had given him a sizable escrow account. He’d started tapping into the money in the vain hope that some spending would pacify Nina, but she was insatiable. The more he spent, the more the money fed her tastes. Even buying the dacha here had only quieted her for a year before she had started to demand better furnishings and Western electronics for it. He hadn’t wanted to buy it. Topilin knew that he could never explain it away to his superiors. Peredelkino had been a colony for Russia’s cultural elites, the writers and poets in the years after the war with the Nazis. Boris Pasternak, one of the Rodina’s greatest poets and author of Doctor Zhivago had lived here. Now the writers had left for more affordable boroughs and Peredelkino had become a country retreat for the bankers and businessmen. But Nina had her heart, or her avarice, set on this neighborhood and the social status that it would confer.

Another turn and Topilin finally slowed the car. The driveway was to the left and finally he saw the dacha. Two stories, a small, renovated barn with a short deck on the second level. He hated the building, and knew that Nina had no real love for it, only for what it represented. And Topilin had never been able to accept the truth that Nina would leave him when she met some other man better able to pay for the life she really wanted. He had learned in the last hour that loyalty bought was not loyalty at all.

But all that was irrelevant at the moment. What mattered was that the dacha had a wood stove. He would burn everything, then retrieve from the charred metal any devices the fire couldn’t consume and throw them into the woods along the drive back at random intervals.

Topilin stopped the Mondeo, killed the engine, and pressed the button to open the trunk. He dismounted and scrambled around to the back to fetch the box. He cursed when he saw the contents spilled out across the carpeting. He grabbed for the small digital camera and the notebook of dead-drop and signal site instructions and tossed them back into the box. It took him a few seconds of searching to find the Short-Range Agent Communications (SRAC) transmitter where it had slid behind the can of kerosene that he’d brought. The onetime pads, the shortwave radio, demodulator unit, the USB thumb drives… did he have everything? He swore at himself for not making a list before leaving, and then wondered how he could be so stupid as to think that such a list would have been a good idea. An inventory of equipment used for treason would have been a fine present for the security services—

“I must confess, Adolf Viktorovich, that is a very fine car. However did you afford it?”

Topilin spun around and saw the man standing behind him. He was middle-aged, clean-shaven, his hair still thick and brown, with a few gray hairs around the ears. His overcoat was unbuttoned, hanging open, and Topilin could see there was no paunch around his waist, but he did not seem overly athletic. His face showed no emotion other than weariness, from what exertion, Topilin had no idea. “Who are you?”

“My name is unimportant,” Anton Sokolov said. “What matters here is that you are a traitor to the Rodina.”

“I…” Topilin’s protest died in his mouth. His brain was churning, considering lies and excuses, and discarding them all. One sentence from this average-looking man had cut through every possible cover story Topilin could dredge up to explain away the CIA equipment in his trunk. “No, I… you see—”

The man waved a hand. “There is no point in talking here. We know what you have done. You will come with us.”

“ ‘With us’?” Topilin looked around, and finally saw the dozen other men scattered around the dacha. A pair of cars moved out of a side road in the woods and came up the driveway, cutting the Mondeo off from the road. Half of the men, all fit soldiers, entered the dacha without asking his permission. He saw them through the front windows, watched them fan out inside the building. They would search every square inch, Topilin knew. There was nothing inside for them to find, but it hardly mattered. The worst evidence was in his car, hidden by nothing better than a blanket.

The man approached him. “As I said, a very fine car. And a very fine dacha,” he said. “I took the liberty of granting myself a tour of the grounds as we waited. It is a pretty little estate. You really must explain to me how you afforded it on your salary. But there will be time for that. If you would come with me to the van?”

“Where will you take me?”

“To the Aquarium.”

“GRU headquarters?” Topilin asked. His legs felt suddenly weak, as though the bones had disappeared, and panic surged in his chest.

Sokolov nodded. “I will be your interrogator. I have some questions, and I would be most grateful to hear your answers.”

“What… what questions?” Topilin stammered, afraid of the answer.

“I simply want to know why you did what you have done,” Sokolov explained. “Only that.”

Topilin stared at him, uncomprehending. “And you have no questions about—”

“About how you did your business with the CIA?” Sokolov asked. “No. Do you think we would have caught you if we did not already know those details?”

They know everything, Sokolov realized. It would not have mattered if he had managed to burn the equipment and supplies in his car. “And if I cooperate?” Perhaps there was some hope?

“Whether you cooperate or not will have no effect on your sentence, I’m afraid,” Sokolov said. “I’m sorry it is so. I think mercy is a trait lacking in so many of the men in our business, but my opinion doesn’t matter. In your case, my orders are not discretionary.”

No trial? Topilin realized. “And what is my sentence?” he asked, incredulous. He was sure that he knew the answer.

“Surely you remember the history classes that we teach to our officers and staff?” the man answered, a question for a question.

Topilin closed his eyes and his head fell forward. “I do.”

The man shrugged. “I thought so. Come—”

Topilin lunged forward, thrusting his hand underneath the blanket in the trunk of his car, where he’d laid his Grach pistol. From the corner of his eye, he saw that Sokolov was not moving. The desperate engineer pulled the pistol out, grabbing the slide and pulling it back to load the first round—

A hand smashed into his face, blinding him, then a hard blow on his wrist, where the radius met the scaphoid, and burning pain exploded through his hand, paralyzing the muscles. Topilin tried to force his eyes open. Too late, he felt the Grach being ripped from his grasp, pulled in the direction opposite the way his fingers could bend.

Then the pistol was gone and he didn’t know where, until he felt the metal grip smashed into the vertebrae of his neck. Pain like Topilin had never felt erupted through his body and he went down, all control of his arms and legs lost. His breath gone, he lay on the gravel. He could not speak. He heard himself moaning, like the guttural cries of a wounded cow.

The Spetsnaz team leader offered the Grach to Sokolov. “Sir, we’re ready to breach the house.”

Sokolov took the pistol, ejected the clip, and made sure the chamber was clear. “Proceed. There could be hidden spaces in the building.” He knelt down by the crippled man. “Perhaps our friend Topilin would care to tell us where they are? It would be a shame to tear apart such a lovely home. What say you? Is there anything hidden inside?”

Topilin could not answer. Finally, he shook his head.

“I regret that that is an answer I cannot trust,” Sokolov said. “Had you nodded, I would have waited until you had recovered and given you the chance to reveal them. Cooperation would not spare you, but it might have made things to come easier for your wife. But saying there are none? You could be telling the truth, but we will have to see for ourselves. For your wife’s sake, I do hope you have not tried to deceive us.” Sokolov turned to the Spetsnaz officer. “Proceed, Captain. You need not be gentle with anything. But looting will not be tolerated. Anything that remains intact will be considered potential evidence and any man trying to abscond with such property will answer to me.”

“Very good, sir. Also, I suggest that we should leave a detail to watch the property after we’re finished. It is possible that Topilin’s handler or some other CIA officer could come, trying to connect with him.”

Sokolov considered the possibility. “No, I think not,” he said after a moment’s thought. “They have all been expelled from the country. I think under the circumstances, they would imagine that any kind of operational act would be a serious risk.” Sokolov smiled at his subordinate. “Besides, we have already secured our primary objective here. Anything else we find is just sauce for the goose. So take the place apart. Once you are satisfied that there is nothing undiscovered, we will be done here. This all will be the FSB’s mess to clean up. Let them watch the house if they want.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sokolov faced his prisoner. “Come, Adolf Viktorovich, we will talk on the drive home.” He waved to two other Spetsnaz officers. They lifted the engineer by his armpits, ignoring his cry of pain as the movement shifted his fractured vertebrae. Helpless, Adolf Topilin hung there in their hands as the soldiers dragged him to the armored van waiting in the road, the last car ride he would ever take on the last day of his life.

Lavrov read the two-page report, then closed the folder in which it was stapled and set it on his desk. “So, I am told that one of the men on your list has been neutralized,” he said. “A good start. Several more remain, of course, but a good start.” He pulled a beer bottle out of a small refrigerator hidden in a cabinet behind his desk. “I estimate that the immediate threats will be resolved in… oh, a week.” He pulled a bottle opener from his desk and ripped the bottle cap off the glass neck.

“This is not what I wanted,” Maines muttered, afraid to say anything that might offend Lavrov.

The Russian smiled at the pitiful American. “Mr. Maines, you truly do not understand treason, do you? Treason and the nature of information.” The Russian sipped at his bottle of chilled beer, a Vasileostrovsky dark. He had offered none to Maines. He was sure the American was thirsty, but Maines’s dominant right hand was encased in plaster, his left likely would be shaky from the morphine and other drugs in his system, and it would not do for him to spill any of the alcohol on the expensive rug under their feet. The man’s extremity would be crippled for life, barring major surgery involving titanium pins and reconstruction of the muscles. It was a minor miracle he was lucid enough to talk given the painkillers he was taking.

“Some twenty years ago, your country’s Bush administration did something so stupid I could hardly believe it,” Lavrov explained. “No, it is not what you think, not that business about Iraq. It was the day they declared that papers already released to the public, already filed in your National Archive, some of them decades old… they said they were again classified documents. Can you believe such a thing? They imagined that information once made free could be pulled back and somehow controlled again. Foolishness. I could not imagine what idiocy, what absurd reasoning could lead any bureaucrat to think it could be done. Oh yes, a government can declare that possessing a document is legal or illegal at a whim. But make people forget the contents? No.”

Lavrov took a long swig of the beer this time, draining almost half the contents. “I have heard a saying from some of our computer hackers, which I think originated in your country,” he continued. “ ‘Information wants to be free,’ they say. Of course, information wants nothing, but what it truly means is that once released into the open, it cannot be taken back. Secrets lost are lost forever. All you can hope is that the world will forget it over time, as the Chinese have tried to manage with their butchery at Tiananmen Square thirty years ago. But only one person needs to remember it or hide a copy of it, written in some journal or copied in some file. Years later they pass it to another, and a new copy is made, repeated over the telephone or posted on some website, and so on.” Lavrov took a break to swill more alcohol before continuing. “Information is a virus, always lying dormant until the conditions are right for it to erupt and fill the world again. That is why the state must hold it tight, letting it out most carefully, so that the public is only ever exposed to the most harmless bits… the ones that will make no difference, even when the people act on them… because people will act, and they will do so foolishly. So long as the people can make harmful decisions, they cannot be given the ammunition to hurt themselves or the people around them.”

Lavrov finished the bottle and set it on the table in front of the parched American. “Do you understand what I am saying to you?” he asked. “Treason is not a sin for which one can atone. Once you have told the enemy what he should not know, you can never control where that information will go. So there is no restitution you can make. Perhaps you believe that you have done it for some virtuous reason, or perhaps you were just a selfish man. But the fact is that you have hurt your country in a way that will never heal. It will try to compensate for your choice, try to rebuild what you have torn down, but the true effects cannot be undone.” The Russian shook his head, frowning.

“You made me tell you more than I wanted,” Maines said, his words slightly slurred. The morphine dosage running through him was too high for his body mass, and his mind was foggy. The man would likely end up addicted to the drug.

Lavrov smiled, incredulous. “You surprise me. You, a case officer, and you do not understand the control that an intelligence service has over an asset who has placed himself in its care?”

“I didn’t want to be in your care,” Maines protested as strongly as the morphine allowed. “I didn’t want to defect. You set me up.”

“Yes, I did,” Lavrov said. “But you made it possible, and, I must admit, quite easy. You are not a clever man, Mr. Maines. You are an educated man, but not a clever one. And that is a terrible failing in an intelligence officer, one I never saw in CIA officers before. The Main Enemy’s operatives used to be so cunning. But you… a failure of training, maybe?” The Russian stopped short, then smiled, as though some great insight had appeared in his mind. “Perhaps I was wrong. The CIA has forgotten its own past victories? The tactics that let them win the Cold War? Perhaps some bits of knowledge can be forgotten after all.”

Lavrov finished the bottle and set it carefully on the desk. “That is the other interesting fact about information… it does not care how it is spread. It can be given and it can be taken. How one obtains it is immaterial, the information is the same. And you put yourself in a position where your information could be taken from you, where you could not protect it or call on others to help you do so… another terrible sin for an intelligence officer. Perhaps not so serious a form of treason as giving the information away, but a sin nonetheless. To put yourself in the care of others and then think you can decide what to share and what to hide? Naïveté of the worst kind.”

“You’re a lunatic,” Maines dared to say, the words so slurred that Lavrov almost couldn’t understand them.

“No, I am not a lunatic, Mr. Maines,” Lavrov said. “I am just more clever than you, which is why you are sitting in my office with a crippled hand and a head full of drugs. But I am not an ungrateful man. Quite the opposite, I am very grateful to you for giving me Miss Stryker’s name, and telling me about the CIA’s Red Cell. I was not aware that such a unit existed. A group of analysts whose job is to consider the improbable possibilities, to go beyond the intelligence on the page and apply history to the present? Brilliant. I must set up such a unit within the GRU… that is another reason I should like to talk to Miss Stryker. Do you think she might consider working for me?”

“I think,” Maines slurred, “that she’ll tell you where you can go and what you can do to yourself while you’re waiting to arrive.”

“Indeed,” Lavrov said, glee in his voice. “But such a unit must be willing to speak truth to the authorities, no? Have the courage to say what no one else wants to say? That is so rare here… so rare anywhere really.” He stood up, turned to the window, and looked out into the dark at the Kremlin lights. “It should not be so. The authorities always learn eventually that they have been told lies. Do you read history, Mr. Maines?” He waited for a few seconds but the American didn’t answer. “There is a story from the Second Great War… I do not know if it’s true,” Lavrov continued. “After the Normandy invasion, Hitler’s generals were afraid to tell him day after day of the Reich’s many defeats in the final year of the war. So instead, they told him day after day that his armies were winning great victories, killing American, British, and Russian soldiers in large numbers. After many days of this, Hitler finally said, ‘If we are winning so many victories, why do the battles keep getting closer to Berlin?’ ”

Lavrov laughed. “Truth wins the day eventually. Better to hear it early rather than late when there is little that can be done about it.”

The Russian sighed. “Yes, better not to delay.” Lavrov called out and an aide strode into the room. The general pulled out a notepad and scribbled a name on the paper, then tore it out and gave it to the functionary. “Contact Colonel Sokolov at the Aquarium and pass him this name. He is waiting for it. And please have the orderlies assist Mr. Maines back to his dormitory. He is not feeling well, and the sleep will do him some good.”

The signal for a meeting was simple, a piece of tape on an iron fence post. If Topilin wanted the meeting, the tape would be vertical. If the CIA officer wanted the meeting, it would be horizontal. Finding the right street and the right post had taken Kyra half the day thanks to her inability to read Russian, but the GPS had finally led her to the spot. She’d come with a roll of tape in hand, but had been surprised to find two vertical stripes — Topilin’s signal for an emergency. Kyra had returned to the safe house after that and pulled up his file on the classified computer, which had taken another hour. His file said that his next steps were to dispose of all incriminating evidence that the Agency had given him, then meet at an exfiltration point in the village of Vyborg, northeast of St. Petersburg near the Russian-Finnish border. His CIA handler would meet him there, where Topilin and his wife would hide in the trunk under a thermal blanket that would mask their body heat from sensors mounted at the border outposts. They would be given a mild sedative to calm their nerves, lest they panic from claustrophobia or some other terror, but that step wasn’t in the actual file.

Vyborg was over five hundred miles from Moscow, a full day’s drive by car. She prayed that Topilin hadn’t left for the village yet. The GPS could lead her to Vyborg, but she doubted she would be able to find a man hiding there. She didn’t even know Topilin’s face. Even if she could find him, the round trip would take two days that she was sure she couldn’t spare. Kyra needed to intercept Topilin before that or he would be beyond her reach as surely as if he’d been captured.

Where to destroy the evidence? Not at home, surely. Kyra knew Topilin’s handler would have counseled against that. Burning plastics gave off an unmistakable smell that could raise suspicions. His file said that he had a dacha. That seemed more likely. It was southwest of the city and therefore somewhat out of his way if he was heading for Vyborg, but she didn’t know enough about the man to know what other options he might have available to him.

Kyra parked a half mile away down a side road and ran through the woods, navigating her way using the map in her head that she had studied, instead of the GPS. The Russian fall was colder than she’d expected, and she felt a chill until she got up to speed, her own body heat warming her. The dacha appeared through the trees after ten minutes or so, a tidy little renovated barn by the looks of it, with a deck coming off the back. A late-model Ford was sitting in front of the house, her view of it partly blocked by one corner of the house. Kyra felt her spirits surge. He’s here—

A man appeared from behind the corner, grubby with oil-stained coveralls. Topilin? she wondered. That seemed unlikely. She supposed the mole might have dressed in the grubby clothes to keep the smoke and stains from burning evidence off his clothes, but something told her it wasn’t so.

She shifted her position carefully to the right, trying to get a better view of the man through the underbrush. After moving a dozen feet, a second car came into view… a flatbed tow truck.

No.

The man in the coveralls needed ten minutes to get the Mondeo onto the truck bed and chain it down. He checked the restraints for tension, then mounted the cab, started the engine, and slowly made his way out toward the road, the trees finally taking him out of sight.

Kyra wanted to scream at the receding vehicle, at the driver, at anyone. If this was Topolin’s dacha, if that was his car, then Topilin likely had been detained. She felt anger and depression mix inside her, certain that Topilin was a dead man. She prayed she was wrong, but she knew that she was not.

Kyra reset her clock and waited, shivering in the woods for another hour, searching for any other signs of life. The sun was low over the trees by the end of her self-imposed deadline, and she saw no lights in the house. She crept forward, leaned around the corner of the house, and saw no one.

The front door hung ajar. She moved closer and saw that the knob had been torn out. No no no… she screamed in her mind. She listened, heard no voices or movement inside. She opened the door gently, and stepped in.

The dacha interior was destroyed. There had been abandoned buildings in Vogelsang’s decrepit state that had been in better condition. The walls had been torn open, the furniture gutted. The appliances in the kitchen were out of place, moved away from the walls so the intruders could search the spaces behind. A quick sweep of the house confirmed that every room had been dismantled in the same violent fashion.

There was a wood stove on the first floor in the front room. Kyra’s family home had had one when she was young, a necessity living in the Virginia backwoods, where a snowstorm could cut off power and escape for days at a time. She’d spent many winter days keeping it fed with split oak logs on her father’s orders. She could always get the fire inside raging, far hotter than any oven, a thousand degrees at the center when it was roaring. She loved the feeling of raw heat coming off the old cast-iron sides, which could linger for hours after the fire had burned down to coals.

Heat, she thought. Kyra walked over to the wood stove. If Topilin had come to destroy evidence, he would have used the wood stove to do it.

She reached out slowly. There was no heat from the stove. She touched the cast iron, cold as the rocks outside. Kyra swung open the doors. The inside was covered with a thin layer of gray ash, whatever Topilin had been unable to scoop up after his last fire, which clearly had been some time ago.

Topilin hadn’t been able to destroy his equipment.

Kyra could see how it had played out. The man had made it this far, but the Russian security services had been waiting for him. They’d taken him after he’d gotten out of his car but before he’d been able to carry anything inside the house.

She left the dacha, walked outside, and looked at the ground where the car had been. It was dark now, and she pulled out her flashlight, turned it on, and swept the ground. There were footprints in the dust left by the sparse gravel, made by different soles and shoe sizes. Kyra couldn’t tell how many men had been here, but it had been several. Then two long lines where the gravel had been knocked aside. She stared at them, confused, then realized they’d been made by a man’s shoes as he was dragged along the ground.

Adolf Viktorovich Topilin was a dead man walking somewhere inside Lubyanka Prison, she was sure. Kyra turned off her flashlight and cursed Maines and Lavrov, and any Russian who’d had a hand in Topilin’s arrest.

Should’ve gone for Puchkov first, she thought. The major would’ve been the better choice. Kyra had been trying to be professional, go for the man who could confirm the existence of the EMP instead of the asset with the broader access to information. Puchkov might have been able to give her a clue to the locations of both Jon and the EMP.

No time for that, a voice in her head chided her. Topilin is gone. He’s a dead man. Two moles left. You have to move.

Kyra turned back and jogged into the woods, running for her car. Moscow was an hour to the northeast, and she had to get back to the safe house. She needed to be ready to move at sunrise.