by Saul Herzog
“Which he picked up?”
“Which he picked up,” Lance said.
“And you intercepted?”
He nodded.
“What was inside it?”
“It was…” Lance said, then he stopped.
“Lance,” Laurel said.
“It was a photograph,” he said. “At least, that’s what I thought at first. It was blurry. Black and white. Then I realized it was an ultrasound. The original. From the hospital. It had an identifier on it showing the name of the obstetrician. Someone in the maternal ward at John’s Hopkins. It had a date from a few days earlier.”
“Wait,” Laurel said.
“And it had Clarice’s name in the top right corner,” he blurted.
“You mean?”
“I knew, Laurel.”
“You knew?”
“It all came to me at once, Laurel. Clarice was pregnant. She was the one selling secrets to the Russians.”
“And the baby…”.
“And she’d gotten pregnant by me on purpose, Laurel. So that they’d have something over me. Something they could use against me.”
“Lance.”
“Kompromat,” he said. “The baby was their kompromat. They were going to turn me. And Clarissa was in on all of it.”
“I never heard of anything like it,” Laurel said.
“Well, now you have.”
“And you knew all of it.”
Lance laughed again.
“Lance,” Laurel said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were duped. That’s all. And everyone else was too. She was your handler. She duped Roth long before she ever got to you.”
“You still don’t understand,” Lance said, shaking his head.
“I do,” she said. “The assassin. The man Roth sent to kill Clarice. He was found dead two weeks later. You went after him.”
“Went after him?”
“Sandra Shrader had proof. She used it to try to convince the president you’d gone rogue.”
“Shrader?”
“The NSA Director.”
Lance let out a long sigh. “You’d think she’d have better information than that,” Lance said.
“What better information?”
“I didn’t go after the man who killed Clarice.”
“Lance, you don’t need to lie to me. I’ve got your back on this.”
“I didn’t go after the assassin, Laurel. I am the assassin.”
All the blood drained from Laurel’s face, and she turned white as a ghost.
“What?” she stammered.
“I’m the man who killed Clarice Snow.”
Her face was blank as a sheet of paper, like she couldn’t comprehend his words. Then, slowly, her head began to shake from side to side.
“Laurel,” he said, but she was already stepping back from him.
“What did you say?” she said at last.
“You heard what I said.”
“But … but how?”
“Those were my orders,” he said. “Roth didn’t know she was carrying my child, but I did.”
“You should have told him.”
“Maybe I should have,” Lance said, “but I was trying to be a good soldier.”
“What kind of man?” she said, still shaking her head.
“What kind of man kills his own child?” Lance said, finishing the question for her.
She was speechless. In shock. It was all she could do just to look at him.
“I obeyed the order, Laurel. And it took me a while, but now I know that I shouldn’t have. And I swear, as long as I live, I never will again.”
4
Agata stopped at a gas station outside Riga and filled her tank. She drove a new Mercedes hatchback but went into the station anyway and asked for the mechanic. She didn’t want to get out to the border region and run into car trouble. The mechanic checked her oil and tire pressure and sold her a gallon of washer fluid.
Inside the store, she used the ATM to withdraw cash, she didn’t want to be reliant only on cards, and stocked up on snacks. She grabbed chips, a candy bar, and a selection of sandwiches from the refrigerator, one with a cream cheese filling, one with ham. She also picked up some sparkling water and a large cup of coffee.
When she got back to the car, she poured the coffee into her thermos and put it in the cupholder. Everything else, she put on the passenger seat next to her. She programmed her GPS with the coordinates of the police station in the village of Ziguri, then pulled back onto the highway.
Ziguri was in the extreme northeast of the country, an area of dense forest where wolves still roamed in packs, and the villagers were more likely to carry rifles than cell phones. She wasn’t sure her cell would work when she got there, so she called her captain, Alfreds Kuzis, and left another message.
She wouldn’t usually follow up on a lead like this without speaking to him first, but she’d been trying his cell all morning, and he just wasn’t picking up. She knew the reason. He was up at the cottage with his wife, and reception out there was sketchy at the best of times.
Agata knew because she’d been out there herself.
Just once.
The cottage was beautiful, one of those family retreats everyone in Riga seemed to covet, with its own dock and a two-bedroom boathouse for guests, but the visit had been a disaster.
Back when she first arrived at the department, Agata had a problem with Kuzis. He would whistle at her when she walked by his desk, or leer, or make inappropriate comments. Once, in the records room, he’d pressed up against her from behind while she was searching for a file.
He was quite a bit older than her. She was twenty-nine. He was forty-eight. He had also just recently married, and the entire situation made Agata extremely uncomfortable.
A successful career in Riga’s national security community was difficult enough for a woman, and Agata had worked too hard to let some dalliance with a superior ruin it all. Especially one as singularly unattractive as Alfreds Kuzis.
He had money. He made sure to make that much obvious. He wore expensive suits and enough aftershave to rival the cosmetics section of a department store, but everything else about him screamed mediocrity.
He’d apparently come to the conclusion that Agata was having trouble settling into city life, and kept insisting she come up to his cottage in the lake district to get away from the hustle and bustle.
The invitation made her uncomfortable, but he extended it so many times that turning it down grew to be more uncomfortable.
She had doubts about his motives, but he was still her commanding officer, and if she couldn’t find some way to get along, there would be implications for her career.
She told herself his wife would be there, and she didn’t think anything untoward could happen given that fact. She even thought that perhaps, by meeting the wife, she would be able to move her relationship with Kuzis onto a more professional footing.
So, one Friday after work, she bought a few bottles of expensive wine, packed a weekend bag, and made the drive up to the cottage.
From the moment she arrived, Kuzis’s wife, a woman exactly the same age as Agata, who’d apparently done a little modeling in high school, treated her like they were sworn enemies. She was so threatened, as if Agata were some sort of temptress, intent on seducing Kuzis and stealing him away from her, that she flew completely off the handle.
Agata listened awkwardly from the enormous living room, beside a roaring fire, with a stunning vista over one of the region’s most beautiful lakes. At the same time, Kuzis and his wife argued loudly in the kitchen.
Kuzis claimed there’d been some sort of mixup. He said he’d intended for Agata to show up with a date of her own. Agata distinctly remembered him making sure she wasn’t bringing anyone.
Anyway, the wife stormed off in Kuzis’s enormous BMW, and Kuzis swore and broke some dishes before leaving the house and chasing after her.
Agata took the opportunity to escape, and back at w
ork the following Monday, she and Kuzis never mentioned a word about the entire incident. Things were a little awkward for a time, but Agata figured it wouldn’t take long for him to get in bigger trouble with another girl in the office. About a month later, she was proved right when he started an affair with one of the administrative assistants.
Ever since, Agata had been allowed to focus on her job.
She had it in her mind now that she could make it out to Ziguri, write up a full report, and get back to the city before anyone even noticed she was gone.
Maybe she was overreacting, but something about her conversation with Agranov had left her very uneasy. She needed to find out what happened to that plane, and the longer she waited, the colder the trail would get.
The threat from Russia was ever-present, and this incident was too close to the border to ignore.
There was a local cop who’d reported seeing something. She would get his statement, locate the crash site, and confirm that it was an accident.
If everything went according to plan, she’d be back at her desk by Monday.
As she left the message, it put her mind at ease to know someone knew where she was headed, even if that someone was Kuzis.
She turned up the volume of the electronic music she was listening to and switched into the fast lane, overtaking as many trucks as she could before clearing the city.
The A2 highway went in a straight line northeast from Riga all the way to Pskov in Russia. It began as a wide, newly-paved, four-lane road, but by Sigulda it had reduced to just two lanes. From there, the going was slower as she was forced to share the road with larger agricultural and forestry vehicles.
By the time she reached Aluksnes, the last town of any size before her destination, it was already getting dark. She’d hoped to make it to Ziguri by nightfall but now wondered if it might be better to stop for the night.
Ziguri didn’t strike her as the kind of place with a lot to offer in terms of lodging, and the road ahead would get increasingly treacherous as it wound deeper and deeper into the forested hills of the region.
Carrying on in the morning would make sense, but as she got into the center of Aluksnes, and saw the vacant, boarded-up buildings, she felt distinctly unwelcome. The streets were devoid of people, as if the entire town had been deserted, and there was an uneasy quiet about the place.
The entire eastern portion of the country was sparsely populated, and she’d heard that this area in particular was in decline, but she’d never imagined it was so bad. She couldn’t spot a single building that didn’t have a ‘for rent’ sign in the window.
She’d never been fond of that part of the country. It was as if the nearer she got to the border, the darker and more dismal everything became. It was as if the immense gravity of Russia, the largest nation on the planet, which stretched from this border on the fringe of Europe, all the way to Korea, sucked up everything that came within its orbit.
All that territory, the sheer vastness of it, became like a black hole, with a gravitational field too strong even for light to escape. The fact that her country, and the entire eastern half of the continent, had suffered decades of oppression at the hands of a cruel and distant regime in the Kremlin only added to that impression.
She drove on until she got sleepy, and pulled over at a little roadside restaurant about an hour from the border.
“You’re from the capital,” the waitress said to her when she sat down.
“Not originally,” Agata said, “but I am now, yes.”
“What brings you out here?”
The question was perhaps a little direct.
“I’m a state police officer,” Agata said.
The waitress raised an eyebrow and looked her up and down, as if determining whether or not to believe her.
She left, and when she returned, she had a mug of hot tea. Agata usually drank it black, but tonight she added sugar and milk. She also had pork cutlets with a thick mushroom gravy. The food was good, and Agata cleaned her plate.
She noticed that the restaurant also offered lodging, there were a few small cabins with steeply-peaked roofs out back, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep a wink in a place like that.
It was too desolate. The kind of place they might film a horror movie about a woman who came in off the road for food and shelter and never left.
She finished her tea and left some money on the table.
She was determined to make it to Ziguri, but almost as soon as she left the restaurant, it began to snow. The road grew darker, and quieter, and progressively less traveled.
She went fifteen minutes without passing a single other vehicle. Then she lost cell signal, and the music she’d been streaming through her cell data stopped abruptly.
She drove on in silence, and the silence seemed to grow and grow the further she got. The trunks of the trees, illuminated in her headlights, leered at her menacingly from the side of the road.
She tried to focus her mind on what she would say to the police officer in the morning. What would it mean if the plane really had been shot down?
Latvia, like every country that bordered Russia, faced a constant, existential threat. It had been part of Russia in the days of the Czar. It had been part of the USSR.
The Kremlin had let it slip from its grasp at a moment of weakness thirty years earlier, but everyone knew it wanted it back.
It wanted it back, and it grew stronger by the day.
People felt it. The constant pressure. The weight of all that history. It was tectonic. Glacial. You could look away from it, but you couldn’t stop it.
You could join NATO. You could join the European Union. You could ally with the United States.
But eventually, Russia would return, seeking what it had lost, what it considered its own.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Latvia was part of the Russian Empire. Nicholas II was Czar. Ethnic Russians made up most of the population in the cities, and Baltic Germans controlled the state bureaucracy and administration.
Ethnic Latvians were an afterthought. They were the serfs. They lived in the countryside and worked as laborers.
If you stopped at a newspaper stand in the capital, daily titles were available in Russian and German.
Not Latvian.
It was not until 1918, and the immense upheavals of the Russian Revolution, the Czar’s execution, and three million Russian casualties in World War One, that Latvia was allowed to emerge as a nation of its own.
And it was a nation that was not to last.
Like the phantom limb of an amputee, Stalin felt what he had lost, and he wanted back every inch of it.
In 1940, he came to get it.
It started with the killing of some border guards and the delivery of a six-hour ultimatum.
Two days later, a full military invasion was complete.
Three days after that, political prisoners in Riga were being forced to march in so-called ‘processions of thanksgiving’ dedicated to Stalin.
Over the next four years, the ebbs and flows of Nazi and Stalinist forces ravaged the land. Countless unspeakable atrocities were committed. Hitler’s holocaust of the Jews took root. The rivers ran red with blood, the soil was sodden with it, and when the dust settled, Stalin’s armies were back.
And this time, they weren’t going anywhere.
Stalin didn’t even bother to create a puppet state. He swallowed the tiny nation wholesale, subsuming it into the USSR. He made it akin to a province, in what was to become the largest territorial empire in history.
When the Kremlin faltered, and the USSR collapsed, Latvia escaped again.
But the question on everyone’s lips was, for how long?
Between a quarter and third of the population of Latvia was ethnically Russian. Those people had grievances, the incoming Latvian government refused to offer them automatic citizenship, and it was to Moscow that they turned.
That made them a ticking time bomb, and Russia could use them to foment unrest, i
nstability, and ultimately, a pretext for invasion, whenever the time was ripe.
Russia was a prowling predator, a wolf stalking a pen, and Latvia was the sheep.
It was not a question of if the wolf would pounce, but when.
And that was why Agata, and the other officers in her division, even Kuzis, took their jobs seriously.
They were like seismologists on a fault line. They knew the big one was coming. They knew they weren’t ready for it. They knew it could level everything and leave nothing but a desolation in its wake.
They just didn’t know when.
Agata was rounding a bend in the road when a blinding, white light flashed across her windshield. She jammed on the brakes, and the car skidded and swerved. She spun the wheel, trying to regain control, but crashed up onto the bank at the side of the road. The car tore through the mud, ripping deep ruts in the ground, and just before it slammed into a sheer rock face, came to a halt.
Her chest pounded so hard she thought she was having a heart attack.
The car had spun one-eighty, and she was facing back in the direction she’d come from. Before her, through the misty beams of her headlights like apparitions in some mystical fairytale, an entire herd of deer was prancing and leaping across the road.
5
Agata woke with a start.
She had not slept well. The bed was narrow, the mattress was hard, and she couldn’t for the life of her understand why anyone in a climate like that would ever make a blanket so thin.
She was in room 101 of the Ziguri Grand Hotel, and she supposed she should count herself lucky she’d made it at all.
It had been after midnight by the time she finally managed to crawl into the village. The car ran okay, but her hands were shaking so much that it was difficult to hold onto the wheel.
The place had greeted her like a ghost town. Nothing was open. Not the sole grocery store, not the two bars at the square, not the restaurant next to the church. The police station had also shut for the night, as had the Ziguri Grand Hotel.
She was so tired that were it not for the cold, she might have just leaned her seat back and spent the night in the car. All she wanted was to shut her eyes and get the day over with.
