The two men were silent for a few moments. “That’s it?” said Pearlstein finally, a strange look on his face, as if he was still waiting for the rest of the story. “No one else?”
“No one else,” said Steve. “That’s it,” he gave a tight grin. “You could say leading Deep Strike is my karma.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
Maya
A shrewd bastard, that Pearlstein, Steve thought as he boarded the red-eye back to Washington. It was almost uncanny how the old billionaire picked him apart. How he almost sensed the presence of Maya – Major Maya Chertkova – Dancing Bear. But there was no way Steve was going to talk about that part of his life. No, he was not going to go there.
He had first met Maya in 2012 when he was working undercover with the CIA in Moscow. It was his second posting there. He’d gone for a week to Saint Petersburg to attend a conference on SIFT and Metasploit, the newest forensic tools developed for the Internet. Maya was a thirty-one-year-old captain in the Russian army, with an advanced degree in computer engineering. The conference was packed, but he’d managed to talk with her during a few breaks between sessions. He chatted her up as he regularly would any well-placed Russian he met who might be a potential source for the agency. That was his job after all. It helped that she was also very attractive with auburn hair, broad Slavic cheeks, and the palest blue eyes. She seemed warm, friendly, not at all doctrinaire; concerned that the new freedoms that had bubbled up in Russia under Yeltsin were in danger of being squelched by Putin. It was their third or fourth meeting when, eyes brimming, she finally told him about her own plight. She had been abandoned two months earlier by her husband – a famous Russian nuclear physicist.
“You would recognize his name if I told you,” she said. “He left after our daughter Sonya was diagnosed with severe childhood epilepsy. She is two years old. Here, let me show you.” The picture on her mobile showed a small, broadly smiling face with the same hair and eyes as her mother. “The doctor said that Sonya needs weekly injections of a Swiss drug that is very expensive and very hard to get in Russia. It would cost me more each year than my whole annual salary.” She gave Steve the figure in rubles. “When I asked him what would happen if we cannot get the drug, he shrugged his shoulders and said Sonya will be dead within a year.” She took a tissue from her purse to wipe her eyes.
On one level, Steve was very moved by her tale. He made a quick calculation. She was talking about at least $100,000 per year. But the agent in him couldn’t help suspecting that this might be a sob story fabricated for Maya’s own personal gain or some kind of scheme cooked up by Russian counterintelligence to entrap him. On the other hand, her plight was just the kind of opening he was looking for. He’d play the next move.
“Maybe I can help you and your daughter,” he said.
She looked at him wide-eyed. “It would be a miracle,” she said.
When he returned to Moscow, he spoke with the embassy doctor and the CIA station chief. Yes, the medicine was extremely expensive, but $100,000 a year was a worthwhile gamble if they could turn Maya into an asset. Her military position could make her a remarkable resource. At first, Maya stared in disbelief at Steve a week later when he told her he would provide the medicine; then she broke into tears.
“Thank you. You have saved my daughter. What can I say?”
“Don’t say anything,” said Steve. “Just keep meeting with me whenever you can. From time to time, I may have some questions for you. How many people know about your daughter’s medical problems?”
“Only the doctor and my former husband. I haven’t even told my mother.”
“I suggest that you change doctors and don’t tell anyone else about the medicines.”
“Of course. In any case, I’m sure my former husband doesn’t care what happens to our child.”
It was necessary for them to meet once a month for him to give her the medicine. They would have to arrange encounters that would not attract undue attention. After a few months, he finally admitted what she already had come to understand – that he was with the CIA. They were in a coffee shop on Stanka Street.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “I am against this system, not against your country. You can be a patriotic Russian and still work against the people who are ruining your homeland.”
“And get the medicines for my daughter?”
Steve gazed directly at her and nodded. The questions began at a very low level, almost like shoptalk: the number of engineers in her cyber unit, the languages they worked with, and their morale. As the months passed, his questions became more probing; the information she provided increasingly valuable. Steve’s new source was attracting attention at the very top levels of the agency. Many of Steve and Maya’s communications were via dead drops, but others required riskier face-to-face meetings, in parks, or cafes, or crowded subway stations.
It was at those meetings that they began slowly to reveal more of their inner selves to each other.
It was a very troubling time in Steve’s own life. His wife, Marilyn, was building a career as a graphic artist, and needed to spend an increasing amount of time working with her publisher and gallery in New York. She finally rented an apartment in the East Village. She and Steve now met only every few months, when he returned on leave to the U.S. or she flew to Moscow. The absences were longer, the intimacy drained from their relationship. On two very different tracks, their lives were diverging. Steve realized he was looking forward more to his occasional meetings with Maya, than he was to his encounters with his wife.
It was about eighteen months after they first met that they became lovers. Maya had arranged to use the dacha of an old school friend for a meeting with Steve. She said it was to meet her lover. What was supposed to be a cover story turned out to be true. It was a cold winter day. They were sitting on a worn leather couch in the living room, staring at the glowing embers in the fireplace. She spoke about hopes for her young daughter. The world was changing so rapidly, who knew what was the course to follow? Steve told her how much he regretted not having such concerns, since he never had a child.
“Didn’t your wife want one?” she asked.
“She wanted her own career. And I guess I was not that particularly interested. I also felt it would get in the way. So, somehow, we never got around to it. And now I’m over fifty. She’s forty-two. It’s too late.”
“I’ve known many men over fifty to have children,” she said. “And a woman can still have a child at forty-two.” She fixed him with her pale blue eyes. “Do you love Marilyn?” She had never asked him that before, never called his wife by name.
“I did once, when we first met, and for many years after.”
“Do you love her now?” she insisted, the flames from the fire played across her face.
He shrugged. “Now? I don’t think so.” He didn’t add that he had fallen in love with Maya.
She asked if he would like a vodka. They had one glass and kept on talking, and then they had another.
He placed his hand over hers and an electric current shot between them.
They made love that afternoon with a passion Steve hadn’t known for years. In retrospect, he realized he had always known this would happen. He’d been drawn to Maya from the first moment he met her.
“This is crazy,” she said, as she lay next to him. “There is absolutely no way this can work.” She turned towards him, her lips just inches away. “You and me together. It can never last. It is insane.”
“Insane?” Steve moved to kiss her.
She pulled away. “Insane. I’m setting myself to be abandoned. All my life has been like this. My father was killed in Afghanistan when I was five. He was beheaded by the Mujahidin. When I got married, I chose a skirt chaser. A man I knew would also leave me. We had a daughter with an incurable disease, and…”