After this, she had a few false starts. From what she could find out about a couple of the code names on her list, the assets were no longer active and it was impossible to ask questions about their identity without drawing suspicion. In one case she looked into, the reports officer seemed so security conscious that Theresa withdrew before she made the woman suspicious. Theresa started to worry that she’d need to take bigger risks than she felt comfortable with—not that any of this was comfortable, not by a stretch. By the end of the day, she’d crossed all but one case—in addition to Lighthouse—off her list.
That last case was code-named Skipjack. From all the online chatter, it had been easy to figure out that Skipjack was in the military and that he had something to do with cybersecurity. The topic was so hot that the members of this sub-forum were careless, discussing cases with far too much familiarity. Kyle Kincaid, the reports officer for Skipjack, was especially complacent. My source is in the new Russian army cybersecurity unit and I’ll believe what he tells me over your amateurish speculation any day, he wrote in one post, striking back at someone who’d disagreed with his assessment of a situation. That caused some grumbling, a few people trying to remind him that a little skepticism was healthy when it came to assets who could lead you by the nose if you weren’t careful, but he blew that off, too. He would learn the hard way, Theresa decided. Pride goes before a fall.
Kincaid proved to be easier than Westerling to crack. Former military and perhaps insecure in this new environment, he was only too happy to talk about his case. Everyone had heard of The Widow, after all, and Kincaid was eager to get in with the Russia experts. It made doing counterintelligence easy when people were eager to show off.
“Oh yeah, Skipjack is an officer in the Russian army. He’s been in this new cyber unit since its inception. Anything he says, you can take to the bank,” Kincaid said, leaning back in his chair and propping his feet up on his safe like he was relaxing in his living room.
“It must be great to have such a trusted source. Eric must think a lot of you to give you such an important asset.” Theresa could feel him soak up the compliments like a sponge. Kincaid was likely lonely, perhaps having alienated himself from his teammates with his bragging and aggression. The man hadn’t the first clue that he was being worked, that here at Langley you were always being worked. It’s not like the military here. It’s not one big happy family. You have to control your own worst tendencies. She told herself she was doing him a favor and one day he’d be grateful—when it was over and CIA had learned what she’d done, when she was someplace safe with Richard and Brian.
It took some wheedling, and a half hour in the cafeteria over coffee, smiling until her cheeks hurt, but she had Skipjack’s true name by the end of their first chat. Gennady Nesterov, twenty-three years in the Russian army. Kincaid gave her every detail about him: he approached the U.S. after he’d grown disillusioned, sickened that his country had been taken over by greedy oligarchs. When he saw what the army was doing with his unit, making it into a powerful tool that would be used to further the oligarchs’ interests, not those of the Russian people, he made up his mind about what he would do.
Skipjack had potential. Under the right conditions, he could be a gold mine. The cyber target was getting more important every day and Skipjack was in a position to give them a lot. She got the sense from Kincaid that up until now, Skipjack had been stalling on them, maybe ultimately ambivalent about betraying his country. That wasn’t uncommon. Assets wanted money and a sympathetic ear but often got cold feet when it came to handing over the goods.
She had resolved that she would only give Russia unproductive assets, ones that wouldn’t do much damage if they were lost, and so she didn’t know what to do about Skipjack. Without him, she only had one name and a minnow at that: not enough to convince the Russians to work with her.
It was a gamble but… Maybe she could warn Skipjack before the Russians came to arrest him. They’d be happy to get the names and it would take time to evaluate them, but by then they’d have already released Richard. There would be damage, but she would try to minimize that.
Two potential names to give to the Russians. She turned both cases over in her mind, trying to be sure she wasn’t overlooking anything, missing an important thread that could lead back to her. Thinking, too, of the consequences for others. For the two reports officers, Westerling and Kincaid, there would be fallout. She felt bad for Westerling, not so much for Kincaid—she had the feeling he’d been hitting on her. It would look bad for Westerling but she’d survive. She’d get a second chance. The assets, Lighthouse and Skipjack, would get it worse. They would bear the brunt. But they would only go to prison. This wasn’t the bad old days of the Soviet Union. Spies weren’t executed or sent to hard labor camps, left to freeze and starve in a Siberian gulag.
In any case, she wouldn’t let it keep her up at night. This was part of the deal when you decided to spy for the enemy. If you didn’t realize the danger, you were a fool. And whatever happened to them was nothing compared with what her husband had suffered. That made her feel better—or at least less bad—about what she had made up her mind to do.
TWENTY-THREE
A good summer day in Washington was like nowhere else in the world. The skies were the clearest blue, the air the perfect balance of cool and warm. Washington’s infamous heat and humidity was nowhere to be seen.
It’s a beautiful day. That’s how I’ll remember it, always, the day I sold out to the Russians.
For two weeks, she faithfully kept an eye out for the signal that would tell her the Russians were ready to meet. That happened yesterday. A chalk mark on the lamppost meant they met the next day at the prearranged time and place. She almost couldn’t believe they had made a decision to proceed so quickly. It was so quick, almost irresponsible. It pleased and frightened her in nearly equal measure.
But it also peeved her, because it was a weekday morning. She had to call in sick to make the meet, even though she resented it. Being a parent, she’d used up too many sick days and vacation days as it was, but someone had to stay home when Brian got a cold or he had to go to the pediatrician. In a way, it was easier since Brian was with the sitter she’d found for the summer. And she was completely confident by now that the Agency wasn’t watching her. Taking a sick day wouldn’t be a trigger.
She noticed as she dressed for the meeting that she couldn’t feel her fingers. It was as though she was having an out-of-body experience, or a stroke. Her mind floated like a helium balloon as she applied her lipstick—Chanel’s Rouge Rebelle—and combed her hair. She’d have thought this would be easier since she’d met with the Russians once, the ice broken, but there was something different about this time. Edgier. Scarier. Like she was about to jump off a bridge.
They were to meet at the National Building Museum, a long brick building in the middle of bustling Gallery Place, with all its shops and restaurants and tourist attractions. Not that she was familiar with any of it. She’d been to the building museum once to see the Smithsonian’s annual crafts show. Otherwise, she never spent time there; downtown D.C. was a swamp of traffic, too much road construction with too little parking. Suburbia was for mothers like her; D.C. was for hipsters and tourists, and never the twain shall meet.