There’s still time.
As she returns the moisturizer bottle to her purse, her hand falls on the tiny Altoids tin. She picks it up, gives it a shake. Is rewarded with a tinny little rattle.
There’s still half a pill inside.
THIRTY-FIVE
The details surrounding Kincaid’s hospitalization, when Lyndsey finally hears them, are gruesome. Found alone in a hotel room, half-undressed, unresponsive.
No one knows why he was at the hotel. His apartment is fifteen minutes away.
The clerk told police that a woman was with him, but he couldn’t provide much of a description. He didn’t recognize her, which means she wasn’t one of the prostitutes who came through the hotel regularly.
The Agency’s Security department was working with the police, of course. They always did when an Agency employee was injured or died under suspicious circumstances. But so far, there was maddeningly little. After Lyndsey reads the medical report, she contacts Randy Detwiler. “I’m no poisoning expert, but it looks like one to me. And this is the second poisoning related to this case, which seems like too much of a coincidence to be one.” He promises to look into it.
She must turn back to the case, as little as she has the stomach for it: Detwiler’s finding on the gelsemium and Molina’s findings mean another late night for Lyndsey. Outside the closed door, she listens as one by one, the others leave for the day. The rattle of cabinets being shut and locked, doors opening and closing. Finally, it is completely quiet, so quiet that she can hear the handler cycle on and off. The air in her tight little office grows stale as she pulls out her files and rereads every report, looking for more clues. Something she’s overlooked. The list on the yellow legal pad grows longer slowly, line by line.
She puts down the pen and pushes the legal pad away. She wishes there was more face-to-face. She’s better at that, understanding what is meant by every flick of the eyes and shift of weight in a chair. There’s more certainty in the tilt of someone’s head than in their words, at least to Lyndsey. She wants to study Theresa from across a room or behind one-way glass.
Near midnight, she finds something that was overlooked before. The manifest from Popov’s flight was attached to the toxicology report, at the very back, which may account for the oversight. Somehow the medical examiner’s office was able to get Delta to cough it up. Perhaps the office was afraid of contagion, and thought it might need to track down the passengers if the cause of death was airborne.
Given what Detwiler told her about the effectiveness of the poison, time of death, and duration of the flight, it’s very likely that Popov’s killer is one of these people.
Delta flies an Airbus A330 on this route, 335 seats: she knows this because she looked it up already. She eyes the list. According to the manifest, it was fairly empty. Inwardly, she groans: that’s still over a hundred people to check, when you take pilots and crew into consideration.
There is nothing to do but start searching in Agency databases. If nothing shakes out, if there are no matches, first thing in the morning she will ask FBI to run the names through their files. There’s a good chance FBI will have information CIA doesn’t, information germane to law enforcement, access to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, not to mention arrest records.
By this point, the office is empty. The last person to leave, Evert Northrop, stopped by her office to tell her so she could lock the door behind him, standard protocol. It’s now one a.m., and Lyndsey pauses in her work. Her eyes are so tired, she’s unable to focus on the words on the monitor. She’s halfway down the list and questioning the usefulness of this approach. So far, she’s gotten a big fat goose egg: not one passenger has appeared in the Agency’s databases, meaning the person has no connection to intelligence, was never an asset or informant, never worked for the Agency, or their name never came up in a report, ever.
She decides to switch tactics and begins to search on the open internet. What she sees quickly confirms her suspicions: the passengers were mostly Russian businessmen, or if they’re spies, they’ve built a plausible cover. And the vast majority of names are Russian. The few Americans are mostly businessmen, too. There’s a smattering of students, and retirees on a packaged holiday tour. No one on the list jumps out at her yet, and that makes her nervous. The two pilots are former military, and it seems unlikely that one of them would be a secret assassin for the FSB.
Then she finds something. One of the passengers is former Special Operations—only he’s American, not Russian. Navy SEAL, then Blackwater, then a few years at other private security firms before disappearing into the ether like a ghost. The downward spiral through the industry, frequently switching between employers, is a bad sign. Or maybe he’s fine and not screwed-up in the least and there are other reasons he can’t hold a job. She’s met enough of these guys and heard enough stories to know that some—a minority, but still some—drink the Kool-Aid and get lost, drawn to the use of violence, finding they like being in places where there are few rules and even fewer people to enforce them.
Their resumes read like this one.
Still, he’s American. The FSB would never hire an American to kill Popov. They have more than enough men to handle it in-house. Nothing to see here.
Except… the name seems familiar. Claude Simon is just uncommon enough of a name not to be something she’d picked up from a celebrity news rag or overheard on television. Could he have been coming home from a private security job in Russia? The odds are long that a job like that would be completely innocent. There are plenty of Russian mercenaries in the country already—why would a Russian company hire foreign mercenaries—and an American at that?
She goes back to the classified files and starts searching on the name. She tries every kind of database open to her, logs, personnel databases, anything and everything. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
She is jotting the name on the list going to FBI—maybe they’ll have something on him—when one of the open windows beeps at her: she’s got a hit on one of her searches. It’s a reporting database, another internal memo for the record. She leans closer to the screen. It’s late and she’s tired and her eyesight is failing, and she knows the odds of this having anything to do with Popov are slim to none. She’s not even sure why she’s bothering with this level of diligence…
Except it is germane. Or it seems to be… She fights exhaustion to make sense of what she’s reading. The report has to do with the planning of an operation in theater a couple years ago, an exfiltration, and there is Claude Simon’s name. Freelance security. Lyndsey reads through his list of qualifications, which all have to do with weapons, the terrible places where he’s willing to work, the terrible things he’s willing to do.
What was he doing on that flight?
His business is making bad things happen.
And a man died on that flight. Could it be nothing more than a coincidence?
She goes back to the old report, scanning quickly through the next part, anxious to see if the report says who brought up his name. Who knew of Claude Simon. Who wanted to hire him for the extraction team, so long ago.
Lyndsey’s heart stops for one long beat.
It was Eric Newman.
Somehow, Lyndsey manages to leave her office. Locks up her notes in the safe—she’s not going to take chances leaving it in a simple locked cabinet now. She drives home through the quiet streets of Tysons Corner even though her mind is racing in a million directions at once.
Don’t jump to any conclusions now. Get some sleep. Things will look different in the morning.