As she came close to her apartment block yet again, the person who came to mind was not American but British, Stephanie Lucas, a friend from way back, an independent woman like her, self-contained, unsettled, more clever, better with people because Stephanie had ended up elected to the British parliament and then ambassador to Washington and was now doing a second tour as ambassador in Moscow.
Carrie fobbed the outside glass door of her apartment block, stepped into the heated foyer, smiled at the concierge, and took the elevator to her apartment. A family photo sat on the windowsill, her parents and sister, Angela, married with two children living a block away from home, an ENT doctor in a local hospital, a stalwart of the community. The apartment’s decoration was made up of Carrie’s travel booty, shrapnel from Iraq, Kalashnikov prayer rug from Afghanistan, pastel wooden mask from the Congo, and, for some reason that would need months of therapy, she kept by her bed a small face with a headdress of seal fur. Rake had given it to her when they first met. It was carved from driftwood by one of his many cousins, a kid called Ronan.
Carrie put her medical bag on the big dining table, placed the phone from her uncle next to it, and used her own phone to call Stephanie Lucas. She was put onto voicemail. ‘Steph. It’s Carrie Walker. Call soonest, please.’ She repeated the message by text. Stephanie would get back to her. She was that type.
Carrie checked her medical bag. Even now, she made sure it was stocked as if she were in a Syrian desert. She called the hospital to see how her patient was doing and got patched through to the senior night administrator.
‘Dr Walker, I have a note here that you have broken every protocol in the book.’
Carrie drew a breath. ‘Yeah. I’m dealing with that tomorrow. But, right now, I need to know the condition of my patient.’
‘Dr Perkins has accused you of irresponsibly exposing the hospital.’
‘Is my patient still in intensive care?’
‘You are now officially under supervision, meaning you cannot lead in theater until this has been sorted. That’s the message and don’t shoot me. I’m only the night manager. But, having worked at this hospital for more than twenty years, I am curious as to what the hell you thought you were doing.’
‘Saving a life.’
‘And if you had got it wrong?’
‘That’s trauma surgery. It’s what I’m paid to do while you’re paid to tell me the condition of my patient.’
‘He remains stable and in intensive care. The consensus is that you are lucky, and my advice for what it’s worth is that Perkins is not a man to cross. Send him a note of apology.’
Carrie pushed away the urge to say that if Perkins wanted a career-busting fight, she was up for it, when her phone rang with an unidentified number, which Carrie would not normally answer, except for the odds-on chance it was Stephanie Lucas.
‘Thanks. I’ll do that tomorrow.’ She cut the call and answered the other.
‘Carrie, it’s Steph.’
‘That was quick. Thanks. How’s things? Are you able to talk?’
‘I am and the line at my end is secure.’ Stephanie’s voice was measured, professional. Carrie reached for a pen and notepad. She told the story, ending with the request ‘tell them I have it.’
‘With this government tearing itself apart, Steph, I had no idea who to call and you know—’
‘Have you still got the phone?’ interrupted Stephanie.
‘Yes.’
‘Tell no one, particularly your family. Give me half an hour. I’ll track down Harry.’
Stephanie spoke as if Carrie knew her ex-husband, Harry Lucas, former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Iraq and Afghan veteran, and marriage-wrecker who ran a private defense contracting company. Carrie had never met him. On a few bar-hopping nights when Stephanie couldn’t work out what was going on in Harry’s head, Carrie had been her sounding board.
She put the burner phone on charge, stepped into her tiny, one-person kitchen and opened the well-stocked refrigerator. She enjoyed cooking when there were people to cook for, at least once a week for herself, something new, something healthy, Mediterranean usually, oily fish, peppers, plenty of salad. She had too much on her mind to cook tonight. She would go to the little hotel down the road, which did the best crab cakes in North America, so they claimed. She would eat and think alone.
Stephanie’s call came through. ‘Harry’s expecting you. Take the phone. Tell him exactly as you told me.’
TEN
Harry Lucas lived in an old-style apartment block between Dupont Circle and Rhode Island Avenue with no concierge, the front door up half a flight of stairs on the left, a surveillance camera outside, three locks on the door and more that Carrie couldn’t see. She rang the bell and the door opened straight away, not by Lucas but a woman in her twenties, elegant, and expensively dressed.
‘Harry Lucas,’ began Carrie. ‘He should be expecting me.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Irritation creased across her eyes. ‘He hasn’t said a woman’s coming.’
‘Dr Carrie Walker.’ Carrie allowed a fast, vanishing smile that she had perfected on ward rounds.
Harry Lucas appeared in jeans and a dark-blue polo shirt, looking unflustered by the exchange. He gently removed the woman’s hand from the door jamb, turned her towards him, and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Sorry, Jane, got work to do.’
She pushed herself away from him. ‘You should have told me.’
‘Give us a moment, please.’ Lucas closed the door. Carrie waited. A draft blew from outside, an edge of ice in the warm air. A couple of minutes later, Lucas opened the door to let Carrie in. Jane must have gone out another way. She smelt coffee and heard low, bluesy music. The apartment lacked personal elements, like hers, things from all over the world and photos of Lucas’ time as a Congressman, the ego wall, handshakes with famous people. Nothing about his ex-wife. Stephanie. No new girlfriend; nothing of Jane.
He took Carrie’s coat. She gave him the phone. Lucas unlocked a door with another thicker door behind it that opened with fingerprint, facial recognition, and a six-digit pass code. ‘Fiber optic goes straight into the street, which is why I took this floor. Anyone who gets in here would be professional, meaning I could track them. Chances are they wouldn’t want to take me on, unless it was government and then you’re screwed whatever you do.’ He spoke conversationally, as if they had an old-friend familiarity, which in a way they had through Stephanie, although this was the first time they had met. He pressed the button on a coffee machine, which hissed and whirred. ‘Help yourself if you want some.’ Lucas placed the phone on a desk surrounded by screens and indicated a stool at a work bench for Carrie. ‘I’m going to strip down this phone, then if we can, you’re going to call your Uncle Art. We’ll run voice recognition, location, all that stuff, and work out where we go from here.’
Lucas took the phone apart, putting each tiny bit on a cloth laid flat on the bench. He used an eye glass, like a watchmaker, to examine the insides and ran a cable from the phone to a computer from where figures and maps flashed onto one of his screens. While doing that, he kept up his chatter. ‘Steph once said you were getting married. Did that ever happen?’
Carrie was taken aback. ‘Off topic, don’t you think?’
‘Or we can talk about this freeze-your-ass-off weather? Or I could bore you by telling exactly what I’m doing, which is finding out if it was your uncle who called, why, whether he’s been compromised, and what the hell’s going on.’
The phone was now in kit form. Lucas examined each part with the eye glass. Photographed them, sent the images off somewhere. ‘I ran into Rake Ozenna at Bagram, on his way to the mountains. We’d never met, but what you guys did in the Diomedes is now being taught at military academies. I crossed the canteen to shake his hand and pay my respects. His first words were to ask how you were.’
‘How was he?’ Two post-traumatic-stress therapists over six months had failed to dent Carrie’s confusion over Rake.
‘Thoughtful like anyone back from a mission.’
Carrie’s changed feelings for Rake hadn’t made logical sense. All he had done was show himself to be an adept soldier, and some hormone had kicked in asking if she wanted her kids to have a killer as a father, didn’t matter that Rake’s killing was necessary. Hormones didn’t do logic, so she had tried to shut down her feelings for him.
Lucas looked up from his magnifying glass. ‘When did you last talk to him?’
‘The Diomede.’ Carrie found herself blushing.
‘Call him sometime. Soldiers like that.’
She had tried a few relationships since the split; one during a Colombian earthquake deployment; fast and gone. Another, a Brooklyn architect who she thought could become a relationship. She took him back to her apartment. He treated her work as something she would grow out of. He didn’t last the night.
‘Almost done,’ said Lucas. The screen image closed like a crab claw, opened again, made another somersault, then settled. ‘Here we go. This is what we’ve got on your Uncle Artyom Semenov.’
Carrie slid her stool closer. Lucas scrolled up and down, made notes, checked a serial number, split the screen into three columns. Maps swept around Russia; satellite shots zoomed down to a city, a street, a license plate, a face. He pulled up mugshots of her uncle similar to those her mother kept, even a shot of Carrie with her name in Russian from a conference in Moscow. Another from the Diomedes.
‘The man who called was indeed your uncle. He bought four phones in cash and registered them to a shell company based in Murmansk. He kept two, couriered the other two to Washington, and hired someone to hand one to you with a number keyed in for the matching phone.’
‘There’s another one?’
‘Yes, suggesting another courier commissioned with its delivery to you.’
‘An individual or a company?’
‘We’ll know when we get the CCTV outside the hospital.’
‘Why me? Why not my mother? My sister?’
‘My guess is from your Diomede fame, Semenov concluded you knew the right people to tell, which he got half right because you ended up here. What puzzles me is why he doesn’t know the right people.’
‘Couldn’t he have sent whatever it is electronically?’
‘Depends how much data and whether he is being watched. The Russians have the Spetssvyaz, the Special Communications and Information Service, their equivalent to our National Security Agency. He might be able to encrypt the material, but he cannot hide the file size. Anything outside his usual pattern or of substantial size would be safer to deliver by flash drive.’
‘Which he could not have done on the phone he sent me?’
‘Exactly. That he didn’t suggests he could have gigabytes of data important to us given who your uncle is.’ Lucas brought up a picture of Artyom Semenov in naval uniform. ‘See, the two black horizontal bands on the gold of the sleeve and the two stars on the shoulder. Your uncle is a vice-admiral. Did your mother ever mention that?’
Her mother rarely brought her brother’s name into an already fractious home because her father constantly ranted against Russia. On the rare occasions she spoke of him, it was of her little brother Arty who smoked too much and didn’t look after himself.
‘Semenov worked at the Hara Soviet naval base near Tallinn, Estonia.’ Harry flipped through to a technical diagram with Cyrillic Russian script. ‘His specialism was on propulsion plant of the Kilo-class diesel-electric submarine, the workhorse of the Soviet navy. His task was to make it quieter. In the early 1990s when your mom and dad left—’
He cut himself off, checking another screen. ‘You lived in India before settling here? Is that right?’
Carrie nodded.
‘That was when Semenov left Estonia to continue working on the Kilo-class submarine.’
‘But why betray his country?’ asked Carrie.
‘My question, too, if his life’s work has been to build the world’s finest underwater weapons.’
‘And if he wanted to, why not just come over for a family visit?’
‘His security clearance might get in the way.’
‘He came over …’ Carrie paused, calculating, ‘around twenty years ago.’
‘Before Putin started making Russia great again. But you’re right. There are international conferences in Moscow; Vienna; anywhere. Why the urgency?’ Lucas reassembled the phone and gave it to Carrie. ‘You need to call him back.’
Lucas spoke as if it were an instruction. Carrie should have expected it, a natural next stage. But the sharpness of Lucas’ tone took her aback. He explained: ‘Submarine technology is the biggest deal in military secrets because a submarine is capable of smashing anything anywhere in the world. The technology is about hiding it, disguising it, keeping it quiet, which is your uncle’s specialty. That’s why this is important.’
‘What do you want me to say to him?’ she asked.
‘Tell him that you have passed on his message and they need to know more. If I signal, ask if he wants to visit. If yes, say you’ll get back to him within the next day and end the call. We’ll conclude from his tone if he feels safe, how nervous he is, how confident. If I signal he’s in trouble, say you’ll get back to him within the hour and ask if there’s any other number you can reach him or a place he’ll be. Keep it bland. Do not use key words like America, Brooklyn, safe, dangerous because they may be keyed in for tracking.’
Lucas ran the phone through his system. Carrie would speak into the mouthpiece. Her audio came through a headset. Lucas turned on ambient outside noise so it would sound as if she were standing on a sidewalk. He pressed the call button. Carrie adjusted the headset, hearing long, single ring tones and the click of an answer.
‘Carrie?’
‘Uncle Art, I’ve passed on your message.’
‘Thank you. I am most grateful.’ Semenov’s tone was assured, his cadence unwavering.
Lucas nodded.
‘Do you want to visit?’ asked Carrie.
‘I would. Yes. Very much. Shall we make it a surprise for your mother?’
Lucas nodded again. ‘Yes. That would be great. I’ll get back to you within the next day.’
‘Thank you, Carrie. It’ll be very good to see you again.’ Semenov cut the call. The Russia map appeared on the screen, with circles expanding and contracting around each other as software found his location. ‘My God!’ said Lucas. ‘He’s in Severomorsk, a closed city, just north of Murmansk and the center of Russian naval operations for the North Atlantic.’ Lucas lapsed into a short silence, arranging his notepad and pen. ‘I need to take this to government.’
‘Which bit of government? It spends most of the time in a shit fight with itself.’
‘That’s my labyrinth. Are you at the hospital over the next couple of days?’
‘Tomorrow, yes. Then I’m off.’
‘Can you switch?’
‘Probably.’ Carrie thought of the cyclist in intensive care, paperwork she needed to catch up on, the complaint she needed to prepare for.
Lucas gave her the phone. ‘You need to be able to answer this twenty-four/seven.’ He unhooked her coat from the stand and held it for her to put on.
ELEVEN
Harry Lucas shut down the system and headed out. Fifteen minutes later, he was four miles north-west of Dupont Circle. The neighborhood breathed political authority. On this property, though, there was no ostentation. Halfway up the short path a lamp snapped on and the rotund figure of CIA Director Frank Ciszewski stepped onto the porch. He wore a tuxedo with a bow tie hanging loose.
‘You caught me at a damn fund-raiser,’ he said as Harry approached. ‘But if a man gets a call from Harry Lucas, he knows two things. First, it’ll be important. Second, it’ll be quick.’
‘Thanks for seeing me, Frank.’ A clump of snow fell from a tree onto Lucas’ shoulder. He brushed it off. ‘You’re still in the same place. I must have had twenty different homes since you moved he
re.’
Ciszewski and Harry had worked on security issues when Harry was in Congress. Harry’s private-sector work had led to their paths crossing since. Harry lost his career and his marriage and rebuilt. Ciszewski stayed steady as a rock with both.
‘Three lines of advice I give young folk.’ Ciszewski stepped back, letting Harry in. ‘Unless it’s unavoidable, do not change your house, your car, or your marriage because all that shit takes so much damn time to sort out.’ He led them to a neat open-plan kitchen looking over a deck and a fenced, snow-covered lawn. He pulled out two chairs at a large light-wood table. ‘Coffee or anything?’
‘I’m good.’ Harry stayed on his feet. ‘We may have a Russian defector.’ He unfolded a photograph of Artyom Semenov in his naval uniform and told the story of Carrie and the phone.
‘What’s he offering?’ asked Ciszewski.
‘With his background, it has to be stealth submarine technology. But there’s a lot not right.’
‘When isn’t there?’
‘That he’s suddenly decided to hand over his life’s work to the enemy.’
‘You never know what’s going on deep inside a man’s mind.’ Ciszewski tapped his forefinger on the tabletop.
‘Has Semenov ever crossed your desk?’ Harry asked.
‘Not that I recall.’
‘His expertise is cloaking, acoustic cladding, the Kilo-class. If he was willing to offer us Russia’s latest technology, then should the CIA Director know about it?’
‘Nowadays, who in the hell knows? The White House runs its own parallel government. DIA doesn’t share everything. Nor does State. You know the score, Harry.’
Ciszewski’s reputation was as an oasis of clarity in Washington sandstorms. He had been appointed during Christopher Swain’s presidency, stayed on through the brief, ill-fated administration of Bob Holland. The new President, Peter Merrow, had given no signs that he wanted Ciszewski out. ‘Merrow’s view is that there’s too much flawed intelligence swilling around, and there’s already a shitstorm brewing about this Dynamic Freedom exercise.’
Man on Edge Page 5
