Will shook his head. “Thank you. But I can’t ask you to cover for us and jeopardize your career.”
The Pole shrugged. “It’s dark, weather is bad, I’m injured. I could easily have failed to see three men escape this place.”
Will nodded.
The AW officer spat blood onto the ground. “The whole thing was a setup.”
Will frowned. “What do you mean?”
The operative looked at him. “After he carried me away from danger, the big SVR officer briefly spoke to me. He said that the defector had used my Agencja Wywiadu exfiltration route and resources to simply get out of Russia, but once in Poland it was never his intention to hand himself over to us. Instead, he’d come to Gdansk to be taken away by the team that showed up here tonight. The SVR man knew that and was here to try to stop it from happening. He said the defector was carrying something that must not get in the wrong hands.”
Will felt his stomach tighten. “What?”
The Pole looked along the bridge toward the direction where the van had disappeared with its prize. “He’s carrying a single piece of paper. The SVR officer told me that it’s imperative the paper’s retrieved, that my country’s security service must do everything to stop the defector and his friends from escaping Poland. He said that he would hunt them down and that we should not attempt to stand in his way.” He looked back at Will. “He told me that the paper is lethal.”
Three
The four senior CIA officers sat in silence within a windowless room in the agency’s Langley headquarters. Save a table and chairs, the room was empty of anything else including telephones or any other electronic equipment. On the oak boardroom table between the men was a jug of ice water, four glasses, nothing else.
Tibor, the oldest of the men, was in his mid-forties and had twenty years of intelligence service under his belt. Wearing a bespoke blue striped Adrian Jules suit, a pink French-cuff shirt with cutaway collar, a silk tie, and handcrafted black leather brogues, and with his dark hair styled and held in place by cream, the Bostonian looked like a Wall Street investment banker rather than a government employee. “I asked you here because we’ve got a problem. Lenka Yevtushenko has momentarily reappeared on the radar before disappearing just as quickly.”
“Where?”
“When?”
“How?”
Tibor took a swig of his water and winced as the cold liquid produced a few seconds of pain inside his head. “Gdansk. Yesterday.” He paused. “How? Well, that’s a bit more complex.”
Damien, the blond man to his right, snapped, “But no matter how complex, we still know why he reappeared. Right?”
“Wrong.” This came from a Texan named Marcus. “I’m betting Tibor’s a little confused. Right, Tibor?”
Tibor nodded. “Right. But so would you be.”
Lawrence, the youngest of the four, spoke, “Blow by blow, Tibor.”
Tibor rubbed his temples. “Yevtushenko did a walk-in to the Polish consulate in Saint Petersburg saying he wanted to make the transition to the other side. And he said he had some major coin for the ferryman.”
“Defection on Russian soil?”
“Stupid.”
“More likely calculated.” The pain in Tibor’s head receded. “Looks like it was a setup.”
“Exploiting the Polish exfiltration route?”
“Seems that way.”
Damien shook his head. “Yevtushenko isn’t clever enough to have thought this up himself. Someone gave him instructions.”
Tibor agreed. “But that someone met some unexpected resistance. The Russians tailed Yevtushenko to Gdansk and most likely would have grabbed him there had it not been for the fact that an MI6 team was also on the ground.”
“They were the ones who orchestrated the ruse?”
“No. The Brits were there because they had a tip-off about the defection from one of their assets in the consulate. They were deployed to shadow and protect the Poles, and to help them get Yevtushenko. MI6 didn’t set this up. Someone else did. And Yevtushenko managed to get to that person.”
The men were silent for a moment.
Damien muttered, “It has to be the Israelis, and yet. .”
“And yet I agree with what you were about to say. It would have been a sledgehammer approach to grab such an unremarkable SVR target.” Lawrence drummed his fingers on the table. “What’s MI6’s take?”
Tibor answered, “They think he’s in the hands of private individuals, not a state intelligence service.”
“And how do you know about the Gdansk operation?”
“Our golden source.” Tibor was deep in thought. “Gentlemen. Perhaps we should agree with MI6 that Yevtushenko was extracted by private individuals, and if that is the case, perhaps we should conclude that he was extracted from Russia for other reasons.”
“Reasons that won’t trouble us?”
“Possibly.” Tibor studied his three colleagues. Though he was older than them, everyone in the room was of equal rank. They trusted each other completely, and while technically they answered to the director of the CIA, in practice the team answered only to themselves. “There’s no doubt that we were right in our assessment of Yevtushenko. He wasn’t the big fish we initially thought he was, but he clearly has immense value to someone. And whatever that value is, I think it has nothing to do with our mistake in giving Yevtushenko’s name to the Israelis.”
“Mistake?” Damien snorted. “What we did was damn right illegal!”
“A tactical error, my friend. Nothing more, nothing less. And it was done with the best of intentions.”
“Tactical error or not, it has serious jail time written all over it if the truth is ever discovered. I’d dearly like to track down Simon Rubner and grab him by the throat.”
Tibor smiled. “Why? Because we fell for the Mossad officer’s trick and failed to realize that he was an Israeli double agent? Come on, we must move on from that. We’ve got other priorities now.”
“We’re lucky the Brits didn’t get their hands on Yevtushenko.” Marcus frowned. “You think it’s case closed for them?”
Tibor shrugged. “I can’t be sure. Not yet. But I do know that the field officer who was in charge of the Brits’ team in Gdansk is MI6’s best operative.”
Lawrence muttered, “Shit. He’ll have the bit between his teeth. It’s highly unlikely to be case closed.”
Tibor placed his hands flat on the table and studied his three colleagues. He hesitated before saying, “I have information that could allow us to obtain an unorthodox solution.”
“We’re listening.”
The officer paused for thought. “I have the field officer’s name and home address.”
“From the golden source?”
“Of course.”
They sat in silence for a while. Lawrence was the first to speak. “We can’t do anything with that information. It’s too risky.”
Tibor disagreed. “The information can be used without us getting our hands dirty.”
Lawrence narrowed his eyes. “Give the name and address to someone who’ll do the work for us?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
Damien clapped his hands. “We give it to Yevtushenko. .”
“Who relays this data to whoever masterminded his exit from Russia. .”
“A man who’s not going to sit around and wait for MI6’s finest to come knocking on his door.”
Lawrence said, “Yevtushenko will have destroyed his cell phone. We’ve got no way of sending him a message.”
Tibor grinned. “You’re forgetting about his squeeze. I reckon that if we send the message to her, she’ll find a way to get in touch with him: another cell number that no one knows about, a safe-deposit box, a third party. Who knows how she’ll do it, but we do know that Yevtushenko’s biggest weakness is his devotion to her. He’ll have cut all other ties, but I suspect he’ll have kept lines open with his woman. We gotta hope they have some private communication system in place.”