by Saul Herzog
“Yes we do,” Roth said. “And I’ve found him.”
“Where?”
“In Moscow.”
“How?”
“He came to us.”
“He turned himself in?”
“Not exactly.”
Tatyana was thinking of Larissa. Her safety was the only thing that mattered. All of this was to ensure she got out of Russia alive, and Tatyana would do nothing to compromise her.
Whatever she’d said to Lance, it seemed it had caused him to put himself back on Roth’s radar.
“Have you tried to speak to him?” Tatyana said.
“Laurel’s afraid if we approach him, he’ll go underground.”
“You mean disappear?”
“Yes. He doesn’t want anything to do with me, and she doesn’t want to push him further away.”
Tatyana knew that was a real risk. There’d been a time in Moscow when she first found him. He’d taken a lot of medication and was delirious, and he started talking. He told her Roth had killed one of his first handlers. A woman named Clarice Snow. But what Roth hadn’t known at the time was that Clarice was pregnant with his child.
“I looked for him,” Tatyana said.
“I know you did.”
“I searched everywhere. I stayed in Moscow even though the GRU was scanning every network for me.”
“I know,” Roth said.
“I couldn’t find him.”
Roth looked at her in a way that made her think he didn’t fully believe her. “Even if you had found him,” he said, “that’s not something you would have been able to tell Laurel.”
“Why not?” she said defensively.
“She would have been jealous.”
“Why would she be?”
“You know why,” Roth said. “You and Lance, alone in Moscow all that time, totally off-grid.”
“Whatever you’re suggesting,” Tatyana said.
“I’m not suggesting anything.”
“Sure you’re not.”
“I don’t care what the two of you got up to,” Roth said, “but Laurel Everlane will.”
“Don’t tell her then,” Tatyana said.
“She’s the head of the program.”
“So what?”
Roth looked at her. He knew she and Lance had been together.
She sighed. She knew she could tell him the truth, she could tell him she’d stayed in Moscow to get word to one of her sources she’d been burned, but once she did, Larissa’s fate would be sealed.
Roth would know the source meant something to her. Then he’d find the birth certificates.
Roth wasn’t an evil man, but he inhabited a cruel world, a place where betrayals were commonplace, where the currency was lies, and where innocent people ended up alone in dark alleys with a bullet in their head.
The moment he found out about Larissa, she would be pulled into his world, and there would be no pulling her back out.
Tatyana made up her mind. She would tell Roth about her sister, only if it became critical to do so.
She didn’t know what was going on in Moscow, she didn’t know what Larissa had told Lance, and she didn’t know if the two of them were even still together.
If Larissa could get out of Russia without getting involved with Roth, without him ever learning of her existence, that would be safer than any of the alternatives.
And whatever Larissa had found out about an attack on the embassy in Moscow, or the Chinese, or someone named Polar Bear, that wasn’t her responsibility. Tatyana told her to tell Lance. As far as she was concerned, her hands were clean of it.
She was looking at Roth. He said, “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I’m in,” she said.
He stood up. “Perfect,” he said. “You won’t regret this.”
Tatyana let out a weak laugh. “I hope not, Roth.”
“Come with me,” he said, standing up.
He led her into the hall and down two sets of stairs to the building’s basement. There was a secure door at the bottom of the stairs, and Roth entered a code.
Inside was a command center filled with computer screens, communications equipment, computer servers, the works. It had everything a fully equipped operations center would have, and more.
Laurel was standing in the middle of the room, looking up at a wall-sized screen. The glow of it gave the place an eerie feel.
“When was this taken?” Tatyana said, looking at the screen.
Laurel turned to her.
“Is this live?” Tatyana said.
“Yes it is,” Laurel said.
In the center of the screen, his high-resolution image stretched across eight feet of monitor in all the brilliance of Imax, disheveled and wearing a long fur-lined coat, stood Lance Spector.
28
Sergey didn’t drive straight to Baltimore, but instead left the I-95 at Wilmington and drove south through Delaware, taking the Chesapeake Bay Bridge into Annapolis. It was night, and the town was quiet.
The school was in Eastport, just across Annapolis Harbor from the Naval Academy, and Sergey was amazed at how prim and proper the rows of houses were. Everything was in perfect order, the white picket fences, the neat rows of elms and cherry trees, the American flags hanging over every porch.
It was nothing like Russia.
Even the sidewalks were paved nicely, with crosshatched brickwork rather than straight concrete.
Something about the arrogance of it irked him.
He wasn’t an idealist. He didn’t work for the boss because he believed in the cause. He didn’t believe in anything. He did it because it was his job. Because he’d always done it. And because Medvedev would have him killed if he ever tried to quit.
But being in America, the evil empire, the place against which ninety-nine percent of his work was directed, put a strong desire in him to see it all go up in smoke.
He pulled the car up outside the school fence and lit a cigarette. It was a clear, cold night, and he opened the window.
It was a fancy prep school. He pictured the schoolgirls in their skirts and backpacks arriving in the morning. He made note of the access points, the traffic flow, the positions any Secret Service detail was likely to take up. Then he got out of the car and walked down the street in the direction of Sandra Shrader’s house.
The daughter’s name was Elizabeth. She went by Lizzie.
The small surveillance pack he’d been given showed her walking home by this route with a friend. The two separated at the corner of Chesapeake Avenue, and Lizzie walked the last block alone.
If Lizzie was with anyone, Sergey was under strict orders not to make a move. It was essential no one know she’d been taken. It had to remain a secret. Someone would call the mother immediately after he took her, and tell her in no uncertain terms that if she ever wished to see her child again alive, she would keep her mouth shut.
The moment US authorities found out the girl was missing, she would become useless as a tool for leverage. The secret service would take Sandra into protective custody, remove her access to sensitive data, and assign a hostage negotiator to get back the girl.
There was no way Sandra would remain in her position while compromised.
They had to get the girl in secret, or not get her at all.
Sergey had no qualms about any of it.
He didn’t know why they wanted the girl, or what leverage they sought over the mother. It didn’t bother him to target a child. If the boss ordered, he’d have killed her without hesitation.
He followed the route to the house and stopped outside. He shouldn’t have been there, there could have been cameras, but if no one knew the girl was missing, then no one would be watching the tape.
The house was big. He was no real estate expert but guessed it cost a pretty penny.
Around the property was a four-foot-high iron fence with ornamental posts. There was a sign warning intruders that it was protected by a security system, but all the h
ouses on the street had that sign.
The government would have performed a security audit, but given that Sandra had only just moved in, no changes would have been made yet.
He doubted there was anything about the house that posed any trouble.
He went back using an alternate route, there was no guarantee a schoolgirl would walk the same way every day, and when he got the car, he drove back to the highway in the direction of Baltimore. He reached the city and went to the address he’d been given in the city’s Fairfield neighborhood.
It was an industrial area, with an interstate rising above scrap metal yards and car wreckers. Oil storage containers were stacked along the shoreline, and a few tankers floated on the water, fenced off by a maze of chain-link barriers.
On Frankfurst Avenue, nestled between warehouses and an enormous toll plaza for the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, was a beat-up old house with an overgrown lawn and boarded windows.
He parked his car out front and marveled at the decrepitude of the place. It couldn’t have been more different from where he’d just been in Annapolis.
Inside, the house was serviceable. It had an old sofa in front of a Sony television set with built-in VHS cassette player. In the bedroom, there was bedding and clean towels. The refrigerator had been cleaned and left empty.
He made up a bed in one of the rooms and then went back to the car. He’d passed a Chinese takeout place on his way in and noticed it was open all night. He went and bought shrimp chow mein, spring rolls, and four beers, and brought them back to the house.
As he sat on the sofa and spread it out on the table, he realized he’d forgotten to ask for chili sauce.
He turned on the TV and flicked through the channels. He let the sounds of the voices dust-up his English and tried repeating some of the phrases he heard.
If he had to speak, his accent would make him stand out. He planned not to speak at all.
When he was done eating, he lit a cigarette and killed the four beers, one after the other. Then he went to the bedroom and lay clothed on the bed.
In the morning, he drove to a Walmart and bought American jeans, an American shirt, an American coat. He went back to the school and watched the morning intake. He saw Lizzie arrive with a friend. There was no sign of a secret service detail.
He watched Lizzie enter the school.
Sergey had a daughter of his own her age. She lived with her mother. He saw her once or twice a year, always at the same cheap restaurant near the mother’s house. They’d make awkward small talk, he’d try to ask the right questions, he’d give her cash in an envelope at the end of the meal as if paying for the company.
She attended a school like this in Moscow.
As he thought of her, he reached into his coat and caressed the handle of his gun.
29
“What happened?” Larissa said when Lance got back to the apartment.
He went straight to the window and pulled back the curtain. “We can’t stay here any longer,” he said.
Fear flashed across her face. “Did someone follow you?”
“No, but it’s not safe to stay. The embassy was riddled with surveillance. If the GRU didn’t spot me, the CIA will have.”
“Weren’t you careful not to lead them back to us?”
“Nothing’s a hundred percent,” Lance said.
“How much time do we have?”
He looked at his watch. “We can eat, but then we have to go. We have to clean the place down too. Make sure we don’t leave any clues behind.”
Larissa looked around the apartment. “Where will we go?”
“I’ll find us something.”
“What about my place?”
He looked at her. “Larissa, I don’t think you realize what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“I’ve been risking my life for two years,” she said defensively. “I’m the reason you even know about the plot against the embassy.”
“The life you knew is over, Larissa. You can never go back to your apartment. You can never use your phone. You can never access your bank account. You can’t even use your real name.”
She knew the things he was saying were true, but she hadn’t fully allowed them to sink in yet.
“How will I live?” she said, the fear plain on her face. “What will I do?”
“You’ll have to leave the country.”
“Without a passport and money?”
“I’m going to help you.”
“Really?”
He took a step toward her. “We’re on the same side now, Larissa. I won’t leave you behind. The agency will look after you.”
“What agency?”
“The CIA, Larissa.”
Her head was spinning.
She went into the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove.
“Do you want coffee?” she said.
Lance nodded. “I bought some groceries.”
She looked through the bag and unpacked what he’d brought. Some chicken, an onion, mushrooms. There was pasta and a jar of pasta sauce too.
“I suppose you want me to cook.”
“I can do it,” he said.
She shook her head and began filling a pot with water.
Lance began packing up their things. He’d also bought a bottle of household bleach, and he soaked a rag in it and wiped down all the surfaces.
It made the place stink like a public washroom.
“There’s a hotel across the street from the embassy,” Lance said. “We can watch what’s going on from there.”
Larissa nodded.
“What did you see when you were at the embassy?” she said. “Do you think the threat is real?”
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” Lance said. “If someone is planning an attack, they’re not going to have to work very hard. Security is so lax you could drive a circus through the place and they wouldn’t pick it up.”
“Is there someone there you can speak to?”
Lance shook his head. “It’s not going to be as simple as that,” he said.
“You have contacts there, right?” Larissa said. “You work for the government. You can go to them.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Lance said. “I work outside official channels. There’s no one there who knows who I am, and if they did, they wouldn’t believe what I had to say.”
“Well, we can phone it in. Tell them there’s a bomb threat. At least get the compound evacuated.”
“There’s only one way we can protect that embassy,” Lance said. “And that’s by finding out who’s planning the attack.”
“So we watch?” Larissa said.
“We watch.”
“What if they go through with the attack?”
“We’ll have to see it coming.”
She was cutting the onion, and it made her eyes water. The tears made her even prettier. She dabbed under her eye with her sleeve, careful not to mess her makeup.
“I think you should pass this up the chain,” she said. “Walk into the embassy and tell whoever’s in charge that an attack is coming. Give them a chance to evacuate. Otherwise, you’re just using them all as bait, risking their lives so that you can catch the plotters red-handed.”
She made the coffee and brought some over.
He drank it while she finished the pasta. She worked very precisely. Each ingredient was important and had to be handled correctly.
They ate at the wooden table in the kitchen and afterward, gathered their things, gave the apartment a final wipe, and left.
“I don’t have any clothes,” she said on their way down the stairs.
They took her car to a department store and picked up some clothes and toiletries. Then he asked her where she usually parked.
“I have a space behind my building,” she said.
She’d been driving, but Lance asked her if he could take the driver’s seat. They went to her part of town and drove by her building without stopping. It was a large high-rise in a residential ar
ea with a parking lot in the back.
“What are we doing here?” Larissa said.
“Is there a specific spot where you leave your car?”
“Yes, that one by the lamp post.”
Lance pulled into it, and they got out of the car.
“What are we doing?”
“As far as we know, no one’s looking for you.”
“Right.”
“If we leave your car here, where it belongs, it will tell them nothing.”
30
Sergey parked outside the school fifteen minutes before the final bell. The sky was clear, and he kept the sun to his back. He was a block from the gates and waited, smoking with the window open, until he saw the students begin to file out. Some went to cars, others to the waiting busses, and some walked.
He pulled out his phone and called Kirov.
“We’re still on?” he said.
“Yes, but be careful. You have to make certain there’s no secret service detail at the house. If she disappears on their watch, the alarm will be raised immediately.”
“I thought there was a surveillance team on the street,” Sergey said.
“They had to move,” Kirov said. “The van was drawing attention.”
“Fuck,” Sergey said.
“You’ll figure it out.”
“I have to pull this girl, in broad daylight, without anyone noticing, and you can’t even keep eyes on the house?”
“Just figure it out,” Kirov said. “And don’t fuck it up or it will be both our necks.”
Sergey hung up and inhaled deeply from his cigarette. Hundreds of girls in identical uniforms were walking through the front gate of the school.
He waited until he saw Lizzie, then threw his cigarette out the window and turned the ignition.
She came out of the front gate and was with the friend he recognized from some of the surveillance photos.
Sergey let them cross the street, then pulled out of his spot and followed. They turned onto Chesapeake Avenue, and he drove right by them without slowing down or turning his head.
When he reached Lizzie’s street, he turned and drove by the house. There was a black Cadillac sedan nearby and he pegged it as a government vehicle, but when he drove by, it was empty.
