“Did he make an offer for you to work off your debt?”
“Work for the Russians, you mean?” Her look is beyond contempt. “I would never do that. It was only twenty thousand. I don’t have that kind of money lying around, but I could get my hands on it. Take it out of my retirement fund. Borrow from relatives. I wouldn’t agree to spy—no way.” She stops to compose herself. “It didn’t come to that. He let me make one more bet—and that one came in.” Franklin pulls back slightly as though waiting to see how Lyndsey will react. Even she knows it was too good to be true. “Sure, I thought it was suspicious… But he said I won it. It would wipe out my debt. I wasn’t about to turn it down.”
“But you didn’t tell the Station about it, any of it…”
“I was hoping for a miracle. That it would all blow over and everything would be okay…” She starts shredding the tissue. “CI has made it clear they think I was being set up. That the Russians were going to start pressuring me after I’d accepted the money, when I didn’t have any choice because they’d have proof I was dirty.”
“You understood the risk.”
“But that’s not what happened, I swear.”
Lyndsey says nothing, absorbing every flick of her eyes, twitch of her mouth, every nervous fidget of her hands. CI says they’d caught Franklin before the Russians had a chance: there’d been a little money left over after paying off her debt, a few thousand dollars, which she put in her bank account. It wasn’t necessarily sloppy tradecraft: such a small amount could be overlooked or explained away if anyone asked. It was just her bad luck that this happened as the mole hunt kicked off, and Security pressed harder than they normally would. She crumbled under questioning.
“I admit I haven’t used the best judgment. Have I done things I wish I hadn’t? Sure, hasn’t everyone? I haven’t committed a crime.” The tears subside as anger rises to the surface. “I’m not stupid. I know what’s going on: something bad happened and they’re looking to pin it on someone. If they can’t find out who did it, they’re going to pin it on me.” Her eyes frantically search Lyndsey’s face for confirmation.
“We want the guilty party. We’re not looking for a scapegoat.” Lyndsey tries to sound authoritative, but Franklin glares at her. She thinks I’m being naïve. “Look, your best bet is to cooperate fully with the investigation. If you’re innocent, you’ll be exonerated.”
Franklin turns away from her in exasperation. She’s shaking visibly from head to toe. Her strange behavior worries Lyndsey: could it be a sign of guilt? Does the heightened emotion mean she’s lying? Lyndsey’s own recent scrape with Security doesn’t help. It’s hard to be objective.
Then she remembers what Ruth Mallory told her. A past incident? Maybe there’s something in Franklin’s past that would be relevant. Reese Munroe, the Station Chief, might know.
Lyndsey stands. “That’s all I have—for now. Thanks for your time.” She can’t quite read the expression on Franklin’s face, but it is worrying. Angry and sad and hopeless all in one. She gathers up shreds of tissue before leaving without another word.
Raymond Murphy is waiting in the next room. He sits on the edge of the table, arms crossed over his chest, chewing his bottom lip, but stands when Lyndsey enters.
His face shines with excitement, like a dog who has caught a hare. “So—what do you think?” He wants the human lie detector to congratulate him.
“I couldn’t tell if she’s hiding something but… it felt like the truth.”
He is crestfallen and stares at her with displeasure. “And you were able to come to this conclusion after just a couple minutes with her?”
“I’m not done yet. Let me ask you—have there been other incidents in the past? Have you spoken to her former supervisors?” She doesn’t want to bother Reese if Murphy’s already spoken to him.
The Counterintelligence officer squirms. “I’ve spoken to some of them—but I’m not done with my investigation, either.” Defensive. She’s caught him in a lie. “But I think you’re wrong. I say where there’s smoke, there’s fire. People aren’t just a little bad, Lyndsey. There’s something else going on here, I know it.” She catches the subtext here. He’s talking about her.
It’s early days in the investigation and Raymond is undoubtedly under pressure by his management to find the guilty party fast, just as Eric is under pressure from the Director. She understands why he wants her to agree with him, but she feels in her bones that he’s wrong.
Franklin is not the mole.
Should she argue with him? It would be pointless, she decides. He needs to figure this out for himself. “Fine—you do that. In the meantime, I’ll continue with my end of the investigation.” It was inevitable that she would clash with Raymond but she doesn’t like the way things are going with him. She throws the door open and exits before she can say anything worse.
FIFTEEN
Lyndsey checks her watch once, twice, three times in five minutes. She hasn’t spoken to Reese Munroe, the Chief of Station when she was posted to Moscow, since she’d left a few years ago. Chiefs of Station were important, busy positions. Lyndsey regretted losing touch with her former boss but had expected no different. That was how it went with people shuttling off to positions in other parts of the world, Beirut for Lyndsey, Minsk for Munroe. She’d emailed him a few days earlier, mentioning Kate Franklin’s name and asking if he could find the time to talk. An officer at Minsk Station got in touch right away to arrange a time, not a good sign.
She sits at her desk, drumming her fingers as she waits for the call. Why has she let so much time pass since talking to Reese? Of all the bosses she’s had, he has been the best, even better than Eric. He believed in her when she was a rookie in his Station. A father figure to a girl who barely remembered having one.
She needs someone to believe in her now.
Lyndsey remembers the night that changed her life: Yaromir Popov had made contact and asked her to meet him in secret. She was a rookie then, knew just enough to know she might be misreading the encounter, that it might not be the godsend, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that case officers dreamed about. She was so excited that she couldn’t wait for morning, and she had called Reese, Moscow Chief of Station, right away.
They met in a coffee shop that night, a block away from his home in the neighborhood of Barrikadnaya, not far from the U.S. embassy compound, Reese still in the suit he’d worn all day, stirring his coffee as Lyndsey told him what had happened at the party. “He wants to meet tomorrow.” Even though she’d only been working for Reese a few months, she felt they had a good relationship. He’d already given her more autonomy than the rest of his case officers—though that could all be over after tonight.
The ring of the metal spoon as Reese tapped it against the thick mug. “It could be a trap.”
But when she had looked Popov in the eye, she thought she had seen something there. She held on to that. “If the SVR only wanted to go on a fishing expedition, they would have sent a lower-level officer, someone more plausible.”
The restaurant’s overhead light had cast Reese in a harsh shadow, deepening the lines on his face. He looked like a man who’d spent a lifetime in a prison cell. “He wants to meet in less than twenty-four hours. We won’t have time to take the proper precautions. That’s just what they’d do if they wanted to test us. See what our weaknesses are.”