The Russian

by Saul Herzog

  “You know,” she said, “Lance was never in love with Clarice Snow.”

  “What?” Laurel said, surprised.

  Tatyana nodded.

  “How would you know that?” Laurel said.

  “Because he told me.”

  “When you two were…”.

  “No,” Tatyana said. “He and I never were…”.

  Laurel looked away. Something in the gas station had drawn her attention.

  “He’d taken a lot of pain killers,” Tatyana said. “He thought he was going to die. And he told me that.”

  “Okay,” Laurel said, still looking out the window. “I don’t know what you expect me to do with this.”

  “He also told me Clarice was pregnant when Roth ordered her killed.”

  “Pregnant?”

  “With his child.”

  Laurel turned and looked at her.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” she said.

  “Because I owe you,” she said.

  “What do you owe me?”

  “Loyalty.”

  A large, black SUV rushed into the lot, its headlights passing over them like search beams. It pulled up next to them, engine running.

  “That’s her,” Tatyana said. She looked back at Lizzie. “You stay put. We’ll bring her to you.”

  Laurel got out of the car, but before shutting the door, said, “Loyalty?”

  Tatyana nodded.

  “All right,” Laurel said and handed Tatyana a piece of paper she’d ripped from the phone book in the gas station.

  “What’s this?” Tatyana said.

  “Switch codes.”

  “Switch codes?”

  “Someone left me a message.”

  “Someone?”

  Laurel nodded.

  “Lance?” Tatyana said.

  63

  Tatyana allowed exactly fifteen minutes for Sandra and Lizzie to get reacquainted. Neither could stop crying, and Sandra kept saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” over and over.

  Tatyana looked at her watch, and the moment their time was up, she said, “Ms. Shrader, we need to take care of business.”

  Sandra nodded. She understood the situation. She’d committed treason. She’d failed to report Lizzie’s kidnapping. She hadn’t known it would lead to the bombing of two embassies, but that was what happened.

  She would never be able to make up for the hundreds of deaths that resulted, but now that Lizzie was back in her arms, there was nothing she wouldn’t do to try and atone for her failure.

  For her betrayal of office.

  She was ready to come clean and face the consequences. Disgrace, prison, whatever the president deemed appropriate.

  “If I don’t bring back the vehicle, my driver will have to report it,” she said.

  “This will be fast,” Tatyana said. “Whoever took Lizzie, how have they been communicating with you?”

  “He calls me.”

  “And you’ve tried tracing the call?”

  “I put in eight separate requests,” Sandra said. “Each went to a different decryption team. None of them could work with it. The calls are being filtered through some next-generation tech. Something they’d never seen before.”

  “It’s always the same man who calls?” Tatyana said.

  “Same prick.”

  “Russian?”

  “If I had to guess,” Sandra said.

  “All right,” Tatyana said, “this is where we stand. Right now, he doesn’t know Lizzie’s free. He thinks you’re still doing his bidding.”

  “It won’t take him long to find out,” Sandra said.

  “But in the meantime, we have an opening.”

  Sandra nodded. “All right,” she said. “It’s slim, though.”

  “Yes, it is,” Laurel said, “but it’s better than nothing. What’s the last thing this guy said to you.”

  Sandra thought back. “He wanted me to turn the president against Roth.”

  “Which you did.”

  “Right,” Sandra said.

  “What else?”

  “He wants Lance Spector. He thinks we can find him.”

  “And he wants you to give him the information?”

  “Yes. He wants to get to him first.”

  “He’s trying to get to Roth,” Laurel said.

  “Well,” Tatyana said, “if that’s what he wants, that’s what we’ll give him.”

  “Give him Lance?” Laurel said.

  “It’s the only thing we have that he wants.”

  “Use Spector as bait?”

  Tatyana nodded.

  “Do we even know where Spector is?” Sandra said.

  Tatyana turned to Laurel.

  Reluctantly, Laurel nodded. “I think so,” she said. “I checked my analog line right after I called you.”

  “Langley uses analog lines?” Sandra said.

  “They used to,” Laurel said. “It’s a legacy system. Barely monitored.”

  “Which is why Lance used it now,” Sandra said.

  “If he tried to reach me or Roth and couldn’t get through, he’d have known something was up.”

  “So, you can get in touch with him?”

  “Well,” Laurel said. “The switches he sent, we need to decipher them, but in theory, they can be used to trace the location of the call.”

  “He left you a traceable signal? Isn’t that risky?”

  “Extremely,” Laurel said. “Any operator at the switchboard could have intercepted the message. He’d only use this if he really needed to get in touch.”

  “So, we can call him back?” Sandra said.

  “I hope so,” Laurel said. “It’s unlikely he called from a cell. That means, if it’s a landline, he needs to still be where he called from.”

  “When did he leave the message?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “We need to call him back,” Sandra said.

  “That’s where you come in,” Tatyana said.

  Laurel nodded. “You need to get back to the office and get these switches traced.”

  “What about Lizzie?”

  “Leave her with us. She has to remain out of sight in case the Russians are having you watched.”

  “Leave her? Again?”

  “She’ll be safe,” Laurel said. “You have our word.”

  “All right,” Sandra said, “but don’t leave this vehicle. Your faces are on every police bulletin in three states and the District.”

  “They don’t think…” Laurel said.

  “Yes, they do think,” Sandra said.

  “That we killed those agents who came to arrest us?”

  “That’s the current theory,” Sandra said. “They’ve got a massive manhunt underway, and you’ve both been flagged as armed and dangerous.”

  64

  Laurel, Tatyana, and Lizzie sat tight in the car while Sandra went back to headquarters.

  The car was freezing, even with the engine running, and after a few minutes, Laurel said, “Who’s hungry?”

  Lizzie raised her hand immediately.

  Tatyana turned to her. “You can’t go into that store. You heard what Sandra said.”

  “The gas station attendant isn’t monitoring APBs.”

  “Your clothes are filthy.”

  Laurel sighed. “We need to eat something.”

  Tatyana looked at her. “Take off the jacket,” she said. “Take off your top and put it on inside out.”

  Then she cleaned up Laurel’s makeup with some spit and her fingers, and tidied her hair.

  “What if there’s a camera?” she said.

  “This isn’t Russia,” Laurel said. “We’ll be long gone before anyone looks at that footage.”

  Tatyana sighed. “This is stupid,” she said.

  Laurel got out of the car and looked almost chirpy with excitement. “Any requests?”

  Lizzie had a few suggestions, and when Laurel came back, Tatyana had to admit she was glad of the hot coffee. Lizzie dived i
nto the food, tearing open a packet of tiny doughnuts coated in finely powdered sugar.

  “Give me one of them,” Tatyana said.

  It took fifteen minutes for Sandra to return with the deciphered switch signatures, and they all sat in silence as Tatyana dialed the number into Sandra’s cell.

  “Is it on speaker?” Laurel said.

  She nodded. The phone clicked, then clicked again, and the dial tone stopped.

  No one spoke.

  “Hello?” Tatyana said in Russian.

  No response.

  Tatyana looked at Laurel and Sandra, then said, “Lance, this is Tatyana.”

  There was another pause, then Lance’s voice filled the car.

  “Tatyana?”

  “It’s me, Lance.”

  “Where’s Laurel?”

  “Right next to me.”

  “I thought you’d never call,” he said.

  “We had a few kinks to iron out on our end,” Laurel said.

  “Well, tell me you figured out who my albino is.”

  “Not quite,” Tatyana said, “but we have something.”

  “What do you have?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Hiding out in a bar in Kursky railway station. My face is on every news channel from here to Vladivostok.”

  “Is Larissa with you?” Tatyana said.

  “She’s in the back, watching the bartender.”

  “Will you be able to get around the city?”

  “You tell me how to find this guy. I’ll figure out the rest,” he said.

  “We think we can lure him into the open.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “How do you lure anything?” Laurel said. “With bait.”

  65

  They drove back to Washington in Sandra’s vehicle. She’d told her security detail she had a personal matter to attend to and to take the night off.

  Laurel told her to put the heat on full and tuned the radio to a national news affiliate. The bombings had the whole country riled up. The story seemed to be snowballing, taking on proportions beyond even what such devastating attacks warranted.

  Despite the president’s attempt to put the focus on Lance, there was a frenzy of talk about the attacks being the opening shots of World War Three, or the beginning of a new Cold War. Only this time, Russia would have the growing might of a resurgent China on its side.

  People were calling for preemptive nuclear strikes against the Russians and Chinese. She heard three different senators say that war was inevitable.

  She was beginning to see why the president had said what he’d said. As much as it sickened her to admit, blaming this whole thing on Lance might be the best move for the country. If it emerged that the Russian or Chinese governments had even the slightest involvement in the attacks, the president’s hands would be tied.

  There would be no walking things back.

  War, between the three largest nations on earth, would be inevitable.

  As they got closer to Georgetown, she was careful to avoid any lingering police presence around the house, and they parked a block away.

  “I’ll go first,” she said, “and make sure no one’s still there.”

  The others waited for her signal, then hurried down the street toward the house. The front of the house was closed off with police tape, and there was a seal on the front door.

  Laurel tore the seal out of the way and unlocked the door. She noticed a bullet hole in the wood.

  They went down to the basement. Laurel checked the security terminal at the blast door. The police had attempted to access the room but had given up.

  “Tatyana,” Laurel said as they got to their terminals, “you see about requisitioning a high-altitude drone. I’ll plant the location information into the database. If the albino is as connected as we think, he’ll see it before anyone at Langley even notices.”

  Sandra took a seat with Lizzie next to Tatyana.

  Tatyana looked up at Laurel, “For the intel source,” she said, “put that it was a Chinese diplomat attending a strip club near the Lubyanka.”

  Laurel looked at her. “You’re sure you want me to enter that?”

  Tatyana nodded. “Lance will protect her,” she said. “He won’t leave her behind.”

  Laurel typed the words. Since it was true, the information would make the intel appear more legitimate. The man they were hunting was no novice. The slightest hint of a trap and he’d disappear forever.

  Given recent events, the CIA and Pentagon both had assets over Moscow, and Tatyana was able to pull up a live drone view of the city. She put it onto the main display. The shape of the Moskva River was clear on the screen, surrounded by concentric ribbons of highway.

  Lance had picked up a burner cell phone, and Laurel typed its number into her control terminal. They waited. The drone was being recalled by the Pentagon, and she had to switch feeds to satellite.

  Everyone held their breath.

  And then the screen blipped, a little red dot in an industrial zone south of the city. Lance had gone back to the apartment in Kapotnya, and the lights of the vast oil refinery less than a mile away twinkled on the map.

  She set up a router to mask the call and typed the phone number into her terminal.

  It started ringing, and the dot on the screen turned green.

  It was Larissa who answered.

  “Tatyana?” she said.

  “Larissa. I’m so sorry I didn’t take you with me. I should have come for you.”

  “You didn’t know I was going to cause all this trouble.”

  “You were safer if I stayed away, Larissa.”

  “I know that.”

  “I shouldn’t have left you.”

  “Tatyana, it’s all right.”

  “Everything happened as you said it would,” Tatyana said.

  Laurel looked at Tatyana and cleared her throat. “Larissa,” she said, “is Lance with you?”

  Lance’s voice came over the line.

  “Lance,” Laurel said. “We’re ready.”

  “You leaked the location.”

  “The apartment in Kapotnya. We just seeded the source. It won’t be long before your little friend picks up on it.”

  “Is Larissa somewhere safe?” Tatyana said.

  “We’re in a bar across the street from the apartment,” Lance said.

  “She can’t ever go back to that apartment, Lance,” Tatyana said.

  “I know that,” he said.

  “And Lance.”

  “Yes?”

  “Swear you won’t let anything happen to her.”

  “I swear,” Lance said.

  Tatyana was quiet for a moment. She was going to ask him to put Larissa back on the line but stopped herself. She looked at Laurel.

  “God Speed, Lance Spector,” Laurel said, and terminated the call.

  66

  Levi Roth sat in a holding cell, on a hard bench, in an orange, federal prison jumpsuit, his ass growing more numb by the minute. Three walls around him were of unfinished cinderblock. The fourth was the steel bars.

  A cold breeze blew over him as if a door somewhere was being opened to the outside. His hands were ice cold, and he pressed them between his legs for warmth.

  The walls were painted in a thick coat of high-gloss paint. It was an institutional pink color and reminded him of chewed bubblegum.

  In front of him, stenciled on the wall outside the cell in large block-cap letters, was a word.

  Arraignments

  Roth knew more than his fair share about appearances before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court. He knew, for instance, that he would not be speaking to any lawyers. He would not be receiving a phone call. He was not entitled to a presumption of innocence or the right to face his accusers, and there would never be a public record of the proceedings. No documentary evidence of any kind would be used to make a determination, and no witnesses would be called.

  He also knew that his hearing today woul
d most likely be postponed without him ever getting near the panel of judges.

  Then it would be back in his cell before dark, and back on this bench first thing after breakfast tomorrow.

  And that could go on for months.

  He wondered what they’d say if he asked for a warmer jumpsuit.

  He was in for the long haul. He’d initiated these kinds of proceedings countless times against others, and he knew they were designed to grind down the accused.

  When he finally got before the panel, it would be his word against the word of the largest, the most powerful collective organization known to the entirety of human history, the Federal Government of the United States of America.

  The government would be represented by a nameless, faceless attorney, appearing from a nameless, faceless office somewhere deep within the bowels of the justice department. He would appear via conference call, his voice obfuscated to protect his identity.

  When it was all over, Roth would be sentenced to a prison term exceeding his natural life expectancy by many, many decades, his only chance of ever getting out being a presidential pardon or a pine box.

  Some guards arrived and opened the cell.

  They were escorting another man in an orange jumpsuit, and they told him to sit on the bench next to Roth.

  Roth moved a few inches aside, and the man sat down heavily.

  “You looking at?” he said.

  “Nothing,” Roth said.

  They sat still, neither saying a word, neither taking his eyes off the stenciled letters on the facing wall and, while there was no clock, Roth would have sworn an hour passed.

  “What did you do?” the man eventually said.

  “Nothing,” Roth said. “I’m innocent.”

  “Sure you are,” the man said.

  They sat in silence for another long period, until the man said, “Don’t you recognize me?”

  Roth did recognize him. He’d had nothing to think about for two hours, and while it hadn’t hit him at first, it came eventually.

  “You’re the YouTube guy,” Roth said.