by Mark Henshaw
“Sir, we have his alleged source and the wounded CIA officer he kidnapped in Germany in our custody. That matter needs our attention,” Grigoriyev said.
“What would you suggest?”
“We have no grounds to hold the kidnapped officer. His forced extradition to Russia was entirely illegal and would complicate our relations with Europe. I believe he should be sent home,” Grigoriyev offered. “As for the general’s source, his information cannot be trusted. At this moment, we do not know whether he truly is a traitor to his country or a loyal officer who Lavorv tortured for information. But in either case, he committed no crime on our soil, none that we would want to bring to public trial anyway. I suggest he be sent home as well.”
The president nodded. “See to it. And these two? Do they have diplomatic immunity?” he asked, nodding at Kyra and Barron.
“Technically, no,” Grigoriyev admitted. “But I think that consigning them to prison would be to waste an advantage.”
The president looked at his FSB director, considering the implication. He turned to the head of his security detail. “Fetch me the secure phone from my car.”
The Oval Office
“Mr. President?” It was the second time in ten minutes that his secretary had asked for his attention and Rostow was already getting tired of the woman’s voice.
“Yes, Vickie?”
“Sir, it’s the Watch Office again. The president of the Russian Federation is standing by to speak to you.”
Rostow’s eye’s widened at the news. “Put him on.”
The connection took almost ten seconds. “Daniel, how are you this morning?” The Russian president’s English was quite good, his accent strong but his diction still understandable.
“I’m doing well. And yourself?”
“My health is good. What more can I ask?” the Russian replied. “There have been several unpleasant exchanges between our two countries of late. That is unfortunate. This business of expelling so many of each other’s diplomats? The great powers should not be so hostile to each other.”
“I agree,” Rostow said. “How can we mend our fences?” What are you selling? he wondered.
“There has been an incident here in Moscow this evening . . . very unpleasant business. Two of your intelligence officers have been detained by the FSB, neither with diplomatic immunity, and the GRU has two others in its infirmary. I believe that one is wanted by your FBI. As an act of my good faith, I would like to return the injured men to you after we treat them in our finest hospital.”
“That would be a very gracious act. On behalf of the American people, I would like to thank you for your concern and generosity.”
“It is my pleasure. As for the other two, they are more problematic. Without immunity, it would be our standard practice to try them and consign them to prison. But I believe that a better solution might be possible,” the Russian offered.
“I would be pleased to hear any proposal you would care to offer,” Rostow said. He wanted to gag on the words. The American president was skilled at the language of diplomats and had no issue with the hypocrisy behind it, but he hated to ever look like he was at the mercy of others.
“We have both expelled a number of the other’s diplomats from our respective countries these past days. You have sent our ambassador home and we were preparing to do the same to yours. This has all been very disruptive. I would suggest a trade. If you will agree to withdraw the expulsion of a select number of our diplomats, I would be pleased to do the same for an equal number of yours. I will send these two home as an incentive. They would be persona non grata to us forever, of course.”
“Of course,” Rostow replied. He let the silence hang for a few moments. The Russian would know that he wasn’t really thinking things over, but appearances had to be maintained for the benefit of the security officers on both sides who were listening in. You want to send some intel officers back to the U.S., we get to send back some of ours. Whoever went back in on either side would spend at least a year under intense surveillance, but the CIA wouldn’t lose its entire brain trust in Moscow. It’ll still take ’em a couple of years to get back on their feet, but that’s less than the alternative. We’ll have to get some new people over there to work the street, but at least they’ll have experienced people running things from the office.
“I think that’s a very generous offer. On behalf of the United States, I accept,” Rostow said. “Please let Ambassador Galushka know that he can return to Washington at his convenience. I will have our ambassador in Moscow provide you with a list of our people we would like restored as soon as I can discuss the matter with him and the secretary of state.” And the director of national intelligence, he didn’t add.
“Excellent!” the Russian exclaimed. “I am gratified that this matter will conclude in an agreeable way. I do hope that we can avoid any such unpleasant quarrels in the future.”
“As do I,” Rostow replied. “Good night, Mr. President.”
“Do svedaniya, Daniel.” The line died, and Rostow set his own handset on the cradle. Kathy is going to have to explain what in heaven’s name just happened, he thought.
Khodynka Military Airfield
The Russian president turned off the phone and looked at Barron and Kyra. “You will be returned home,” he announced. “You will have to spend the evening in Lubyanka, of course. There are protocols we must follow. You are also persona non grata to the Russian people and will never set foot in our country again.”
“We understand,” Barron said.
“Then this matter is concluded, for you anyway.” The Russian president turned to Grigoriyev. “I leave this in your hands, Anatoly Maksimovich. I regret that I did not listen to your advice sooner. I will take it as a lesson that the wisdom of FSB men is not to be discounted so lightly.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Grigoriyev said. The Russian president turned away and began the walk across the tarmac back to his car. The FSB director stared at the group. “The FSB will not charge the Spetsnaz officers who participated in this affair with any crime. You may return to your duties and deliver your wounded to your infirmary. You were only following your orders and did not realize that the man giving them had betrayed you.” He turned to his own men. “Take the general and the Americans to Lubyanka, separate cars. Also, advise their embassy of the need for the medical flight. These two are being expelled from the country and will leave on that aircraft. They may have escaped prison, but we do not have to allow them the luxury of a soft seat on a commercial flight for their trip home.”
“Always wanted to see Lubyanka,” Barron muttered.
“Just so long as we get to walk back out again,” Kyra replied.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Somewhere over Poland
The C-130E Hercules was a cavern, loud, though brighter and smaller than Kyra had imagined. The four Rolls-Royce turboprops filled the flying tube with a steady buzz, but the air outside was calm enough to keep the ride smooth. Kyra was grateful for it, more for Jon than herself. The flight nurses had hung a new bag of Dilaudid and increased his drip in the last hour to keep Jon asleep, but Kyra still wondered if he could feel the pain. She’d been shot once herself. The morphine injection she’d given herself had wiped the pain away like an eraser across a chalkboard and knocked her cold. Despite the doctors’ later assurances that it was a dream, she was sure that the agony had broken through the oblivion in fits and spurts. She imagined that whatever Jon would feel now if he awoke would eclipse the agony she’d suffered after that bullet had torn through her arm. She prayed Jon wasn’t hurting that way, but the lack of turbulence would be a blessing if she was wrong.
They were an hour out of Rammstein. A bus was waiting on the tarmac to move Jon and Maines to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, where they would spend three days at least. The Russian doctors at Botkin Hospital had been as professional as any Kyra had known in the States, and appalled to the last man at the state of Jon’s gunshot wound to his l
eg. The chief physician had declared Jon was lucky that infection had not set in and had muttered some Russian profanity Kyra didn’t understand when the X-rays of Jon’s knee were delivered and posted on the light board.
The stay at Landstuhl would end with a return to Rammstein, where a C-141 Starlifter would ferry them to Joint Base Andrews east of Washington. Jon would spend weeks at the Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, where they would rebuild his destroyed joint. Months of therapy would teach him to walk again and he would probably use a cane ever after. Kyra wasn’t sure whether he would grouse about that or embrace it, claiming it made him look dignified.
She felt a presence behind her and looked up. Kathy Cooke was standing over Jon, looking down at his pale face. She reached out and moved a stray bit of hair off his forehead.
“What did they say?” Kyra asked.
“They didn’t tell you?” Cooke asked. Kyra just shook her head.
“Those Russian doctors wouldn’t tell me anything. Persona non grata, if you’ll recall.”
Cooke grunted, a quiet laugh. “He’s stable. They don’t think there was any permanent trauma to his brain or other organs. It looks like the only real permanent damage is to his leg. The surgeons will have to replace the knee.” Kyra looked down toward Jon’s lower limbs but couldn’t see the damaged joint under the sheet. The image of his leg hanging at a strange angle when the GRU soldiers had transferred him to a gurney for his trip to Botkin broke into her thoughts.
She tried to push the image away. “I thought he was dead for a second when I saw him. Just for a second . . . then he was laughing,” Kyra said, her voice flat, and the memory surged up in her mind of Jon in the metal chair. She had to fight down the urge to vomit. The image had been stalking the edge of her thoughts since that moment Sokolov had opened the door, and it had come through more than a few times. “I wish he hadn’t jumped that wall. I would’ve burned every asset we have in Moscow myself before I would’ve let Lavrov’s men do this to him.”
Cooke knelt down beside her, staring at the man she loved. “Kyra, do you know why Jon joined the Red Cell?” she asked.
Kyra stared at the man, watched his chest rise and fall as the tubes fed oxygen into his nose. “He told me about that ambush in Iraq . . . the one in the Triangle where he saved Marisa Mills. He never gave me the dirty details, though. I didn’t tell him but I looked up the after-action report on it. He killed two men. I assumed that the post-traumatic stress disorder was why he quit the field.”
“Actually, it wasn’t,” Cooke replied. “He was determined to tough it out, but Marisa didn’t think he should be in the field. So she asked headquarters to reassign them to someplace where they could still work counterterrorism without being on the front line. I don’t think she expected the Seventh Floor would be stupid enough to send them to one of the black sites. Jon ended up working with the interrogators. Some of the detainees had been held in custody by foreign intel services who . . . well, they had no moral objections to torture.”
The deputy director of national intelligence reached out and brushed Jon’s dark hair back from his forehead again, but it just fell back into place. “He saw what torture does, both to the subject and the men who carry it out. Jon was handling his PTSD okay until he saw that. That’s what finally broke him. He told me that he saw men lose their souls and he walked out before he got comfortable with it. He joined the Red Cell and that’s when he started closing his office door to everyone else. Between shooting those men and seeing others hurt in custody, Jon suffered more emotional pain in a shorter time than anyone else I’ve ever met. He closed his office so no one could do that to him again . . . and so he wouldn’t hurt anyone else, any more than he could help it, anyway.”
Cooke laid her hand on Jon’s and squeezed it. “One of the best men I’ve ever known. He didn’t close himself off because he despised people. He just didn’t want to hurt any more.”
“He never told me that,” Kyra replied.
“I’m not sure he would have,” Cooke said. She smiled, a memory playing on her face. “Do you remember that first day I took you down to meet him?”
“Yes.”
“I thought for sure he was going to kick you out,” Cooke told her. “Or find some reason that you couldn’t stay there. But he surprised me. He figured out what had happened to you down in Venezuela a few months before and I guess he decided that you’d been hurt like him. I think it touched a soft streak in him.”
“I didn’t think he had a soft streak in him, not until he came out and saved my tail with that rifle last year when we got caught out in the bush . . . when the revolution broke out in Caracas,” Kyra replied.
“He did,” Cooke told her. “Kyra, I think Jon jumped that wall because he’d seen torture. He knew that there are ways to torture a man, and there are entirely different ways to torture a woman, and you’re a beautiful girl. I suspect Jon was worried that Lavrov’s men would break you in ways that can’t ever be fixed.”
“He was probably right,” Kyra said, her voice flat. “He’s always right.”
“Yes, he usually is,” Cooke agreed.
One of the flight nurses came over to check Jon’s vitals and the intelligence officers fell silent until the woman had left. Kyra watched her go, then looked at Maines strapped down on his own litter between two special agents and handcuffed to the fuselage. “What happens to him?”
“Maines?” Cooke asked, seeing the direction of Kyra’s stare. “I talked to the attorney general this morning. There’ll be a trial, of course, but he’ll end up in supermax. Life with no parole.”
“He’s the one who pulled me out of that safe house three years ago. I owe my life to a traitor,” she said. “I don’t suppose those Bureau boys would let us drop the ramp and just push him out.”
“I won’t stop you if you want to ask,” Cooke told her. She stood.
“Ma’am . . . do you think he’ll come back to the Agency?” Kyra asked, nodding at Jon.
Cooke studied Jon’s swollen face, as though trying to reach into his thoughts and discern how he might answer the question. “I don’t know,” she admitted finally. “He really never belonged at the Agency. He has a sense of justice that’s hard as rock, and in this business, most of the time, all we have are bad options . . . all we get to do is pick who’s going to get hurt. So we save the ones we need, not the ones who deserve it. Sometimes we get lucky and they’re the same people. But Jon could never make that call. He would save the deserving ones. That makes him a good man but a terrible intelligence officer.”
“Maybe we should be more like him, instead of thinking he should be more like us,” Kyra said.
“Probably,” Kathy admitted. “And in the end, the CIA would become the most moral and least useful intelligence service in the world. We deal with the devils, Kyra. But I don’t want him to have to do that anymore . . . or to do it myself. Whether Jon comes back or not . . . I’m going to resign. And I’m going to ask him to marry me.”
Kyra looked up at the woman, surprised. Cooke smiled, rueful. “Jon’s been more patient than I ever asked him to be . . . and I’ve given up as much for my country as I can stand. I almost had to give up too much and I’m not going to let that happen again.” She put her hand on Kyra’s shoulder. “I have to call the White House. President Rostow wants another update. Thank you for staying with him.”
Cooke trudged toward the front of the plane, and Kyra turned back to her patient.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER
“The Alcatraz of the Rockies”
United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) aka supermax
Florence, Colorado
There were fewer than five hundred men who lived in the prison proper. The al-Qaida terrorists and other extremists had their own wing, the H Unit with its own security ready to deal with their hunger strikes and refusals to cooperate with the female guards. Two men were in Range 13, the “ultramax” block where their isolation from all huma
n contact was total and they could not even see their own guards. Thomas Silverstein of the Aryan Brotherhood had earned that home for murdering three inmates and a prison guard. He had been in isolation since 1982 and some of the guards wondered whether the old man, deprived of almost all human contact for almost four decades, hadn’t simply gone insane. That he was still alive was all they really cared to know.
Maines stared at the Rocky Mountains on the drive, knowing they would be the last view of the horizon he would ever see. Three consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole defined his future. His lawyer had argued at the sentencing that such crimes didn’t merit supermax confinement, that Aldrich Ames’s treason had killed more men and the courts hadn’t seen fit to send that old man here. The judge had been unimpressed.
The former CIA officer arrived through the underground garage, chauffeured in the rear seat of a white SUV. The armored vehicle came to a stop, ending the last car ride Maines would ever take. The garage door closed behind them and only then was he allowed to climb out of the vehicle.
“A clean version of hell,” one of the prison’s former wardens had called it, and Maines saw that the man’s observation had been accurate. The cavernous space was white, concrete walls and floor, and empty but for a fish-eye surveillance camera mounted on the wall. Maines was quite sure that he would see a camera in every room, every hallway. He would die in this place and he would never know a moment of true privacy until that day came. It was ironic that, most days here, he would be isolated, having almost no contact with another human being, but he would never be alone. Some guard controlling some camera would always be staring at him. He would finally know privacy again when they closed and locked his coffin lid.
Four prisoners had found ways to take their own lives over the years. Maines wondered whether he would want to follow their example, and whether he could find a way around the guards and the cameras and the controls to kill himself if his mind ever broke down so completely.
