She nods. This isn’t too uncommon. Special operations are close-hold by nature, restricted to the handful of people directly involved. It could get messy to let one special operation, like her investigation, bleed into another. It could end up contaminating the cases, mislead you into thinking one had something to do with the other when there was no evidence to go on, nothing beyond your own suspicions. This is part of the clandestine life, being able to live with uncertainty, knowing you can never have all the pieces of the puzzle, knowing when you have enough of them.
“Speaking of the Station,” she says, “I need to talk to Tom Cassidy, but he’s not returning my messages. I was thinking of going to Hank—”
“You’re not still on whatever it was that Masha Popov said to you?” Eric waves off the idea with his hands. “If there was anything to it, we would’ve found out by now… You probably haven’t heard from Tom because he’s helping me with this other operation. I’ll ask him to get back to you—you don’t have to get Hank involved.” That decided, Eric settles back in his chair, a big smile on his face as he thinks about this other operation. “It has a lot of potential,” he says, leaning back into the creaking chair. “Could be really big. I probably shouldn’t talk about it, but… You heard about when COS Kiev was killed, right?”
“It was before my time, but yeah.”
Eric swells with self-satisfaction. “Well, I think we’re finally going to be able to bring the man behind the hit, Evgeni Morozov, to justice. That’s a big deal to the seventh floor, you know. Something they’ve wanted for a long time.”
“Aren’t you a little bit daunted, to have to juggle so many potentially cataclysmic things?”
He chuckles. “No—it comes with being Chief of the Division. I guess I’ve gotten used to it. Life would be dull without it.”
She’s heard this about Eric, that he likes being the man on the flying trapeze. That he was this way before he moved up in management. Addicted to risk. There’s a sign hanging above his desk in the office, like something a motivational speaker would say: no risk, no reward.
“I think you’re on the right track here, Lyndsey. It feels—right.”
“I wish it weren’t. You’re not going to talk to anyone about this until I’ve had the chance to do more work, right?” Lyndsey isn’t comfortable. There’s something about Theresa’s motives that seems incomplete, despite what Eric says. She wishes she felt more comfortable with what she’s just done, admitting her suspicions about Theresa. Eric is technically responsible for this investigation. He has a right to be informed. And yet—as she walks out of his office—something doesn’t feel right.
Lyndsey turns over her conversation with Eric as she drives home, still sick to her stomach for having voiced her suspicions about Theresa out loud.
Theresa has suffered. It doesn’t feel right to have these suspicions about her. And now she’s told Eric. She wants to trust him. She should trust him. He doesn’t seem like others she’d known, eager to make a name for themselves and not caring who gets hurt in the process. Like the Chief of Station she’d worked for in Lebanon, or the managers in the Clandestine Service who sent her to Beirut hoping for the worst. She’d questioned it at the time—she was doing well with the Russian target, why move her to something different?—but she was told she needed to prove herself on unfamiliar ground. A real superstar will rise to the occasion, Chief of Station Beirut had told her with a glint in his eyes that she chose to ignore. She wanted to believe all the honey they poured in her ear.
Beirut. As it turned out, her enemies didn’t have to lift a finger. She gave them all the ammo they needed to shoot her down.
Davis was the opposite of the men she’d tended toward in nearly every way: older, cynical, and worldly. She’d had no intention of getting serious with him. She had played it chaste in Moscow, not wanting to get a reputation, not with Reese looking over her shoulder, and besides, running Popov had kept her busy. As far as the Station knew when she arrived in Lebanon, she was a single woman. She was ready to have fun.
She figured wrong.
She had played into the hands of the people who wanted to see her fail. Not that she’d had a real nemesis. There was no one specific person out for her blood. No, the Clandestine Service brought her down for sport but also on principle: there would always be someone waiting to see you fall for no other reason than they thought you had succeeded too easily. And hadn’t she gone and proved they were right? A smart woman wouldn’t have taken up with Davis Ranford.
As Lyndsey walks up the steps to her apartment door, she wonders what Davis is doing at that very moment, wishes she could talk to him. He might not still be in Beirut: he might’ve been sent home, too. Consequences all around. She’d been kicked out of the country so fast that they’d had no chance to talk, and now it was wisest not to try to communicate. In the moment, she misses him fiercely.
It’s not until she’s kicked off her shoes that she thinks to check her phone and there it is: a little flag next to the pink secure messaging icon. From Masha. Lyndsey clicks it open hurriedly.
I think we are being followed. We need your help.
Can she be sure it’s the FSB, Lyndsey wonders, then corrects herself. Of course, Masha would know: she grew up under the old Soviet regime, and her husband worked for internal security for decades.
Masha and her daughter are in danger. If they get pulled into the FSB’s net, being the wife and daughter of a traitor, who knows what might happen to them?
If it’s Theresa who’s put their lives at risk, all for some petty form of revenge… Lyndsey will never forgive her.
Go to your sister’s dacha. Watch this app. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.
Lyndsey presses Send. She hopes it’s a promise she can keep.
TWENTY-SIX
Theresa looks down at the notepad, the numbers swimming before her eyes. She is coding the message she needs to transmit to her handler, the ruthless Tarasenko, but she is getting lost in the rows and rows of numbers.
If she were being run by the book, she wouldn’t be coding by hand. The Russians would’ve given her special equipment for burst transmissions or some other technical wizardry. Every time they try to communicate with each other it’s a risk, the thread that tethers one to the other, damning if detected. Tremendous energy and cunning go into hiding those communications.
But because of the haste, she must make do: hand-coded messages sent through a messaging app, one that claims to be secure (end-to-end encryption, supposedly even the service provider can’t read the messages and has no access to the encryption key) but Theresa is not sure she believes it. Her freedom and her husband’s fate hang on it, after all.
She’s been struggling with how much to tell Tarasenko. It’s all calculations and risk. Tell the Russians no more than is absolutely necessary to achieve her ends. Hurt as few people as possible. She winces: she can’t stop thinking about the man, Anton Kulakov, who was killed. She snuck a peek at the report, couldn’t help herself though she knew she shouldn’t. The twisted body, so much blood. It’s all on her; there’s no squirming out of that one. A few days have passed, the overwhelming guilt with it. Rationalizations creep into her head automatically: he knew the risks when he decided to sell secrets. It comes with the job. These seem hollow, even to her, but she clings to them. They are all she has to ward off the all-consuming guilt. Once she’d seen the pictures, she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. It felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She was sick and wobbly all the time, feeling like the world had been turned upside down. They noticed around the office but she told them she felt under the weather, thought she might be coming down with a cold. She couldn’t fool Brian, though. Exquisitely sensitive, he picked up her anxiety like a bloodhound. She had to get it together for his sake.