by Mark Henshaw
“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.
Office of the GRU Chairman
New GRU headquarters
Moscow, Russia
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 morph
ine 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.”
Utilisa Lermontov Road
Peredelkino, Moscow Oblast, Russia
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.
