Maines smirked. “Kyra, you be a good girl and go tell Barron my terms for a deal. He convinces the president to give me a pardon and fifty million in the bank, and I won’t give the Russians another name or tell them about a single operation. I don’t get that and I’ll tell them everything I know.”
“How about I throw you off this roof instead?” Kyra proposed.
“I don’t think my friends would let you.”
“I guess you would need your friends,” Kyra spit back. “You’re a coward.”
Enraged, Maines lunged forward, hands out, reaching for Kyra’s neck. He’d saved this ungrateful woman’s life and she—
Kyra pivoted on her feet and hips, turning sideways, and she swept her right arm across her body in an arc, guiding his arms to the side. She brought her arm over his, holding them down for the second she needed to bring up her left to hold his away. Kyra’s right came back up, fingers turned in, and she clawed his face hard enough to draw blood. The man screeched, his hands coming up to protect his face from another assault. Kyra pivoted again, facing Maines head-on, and she grabbed his shirt, and pulled hard. Her forehead smashed into his nose. His head snapped back, stunned, the blood starting to flow from his nose. She pulled again, Maines stumbled forward, off balance, and she drove her knee into his groin hard enough to lift him onto his toes. The traitor fell back, then dropped onto his knees, the blood rushing out of his face.
The Russian guard by the door moved to run toward them, but saw Kyra make no further move toward her victim and stopped.
Maines cursed… and then the real pain hit him, erupting out of his pelvis like a fire burning through his nerves and stealing his breath. He curled up on the ground in a twitching heap, groaning and gasping for air.
Kyra stepped back, far enough that he couldn’t grasp or kick her. “I’d tell the Bureau to add assault to your indictment, but it’s already a long list.” She squatted down so he could see her face. “I’ll tell Barron about your offer, but you’re not going to get your deal. And even if you do get to Moscow, CIA defectors have a bad habit of falling down long staircases after they’re not useful to their Russian friends anymore. So I wouldn’t plan on a peaceful retirement, back home or in Moscow.”
“Uh-uh,” Maines grunted. “Full… full pardon… and fifty… million.” He sucked in some air, then pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Kyra didn’t move, ready to defend herself again. “I get that,” he wheezed, “I keep my mouth shut. I don’t… and I tell the Russians everything… take my chances.”
“If you want the president or anyone else to take your offer seriously, you need to give something up first.”
“What’s that?”
“The name of your handler,” Kyra told him.
“I don’t think… he’d like that,” Maines said, his chest rising and falling rapidly. The pain between his legs was fading enough to manage. He pushed himself back onto one knee. “If Barron gets me the deal, you stand out front of the embassy tomorrow at noon… wear a red jacket. If you’re there, I come out. If you’re not, I take care of myself.” He was catching his breath now, but his legs were still too shaky for him to stand.
“Either way, I’ll be seeing you pretty soon.” Kyra turned around and walked toward the door.
“I should’ve left you in that safe house,” Maines said, his voice still weak from the abuse she’d dealt to his crotch. “I see you again and I’ll kill you.”
Kyra made an obscene gesture without looking back.
Kyra turned to the last page of the photo album and stared at the surveillance photos, giving each a few seconds of her attention. It was wasted time. None of the men in the color pictures was a match for the one in her memory. She closed the book and set it on the stack of four others she’d already reviewed. “He’s not here,” she said. Who are you, old man? She leaned back, stared at the ceiling, and dissected her own thoughts.
“That’s all of the mug books that we’ve got on the Russians stationed here,” Barron replied.
“Then it must be someone who’s not stationed here,” Jon advised. “The books don’t include pictures of short-term visitors.”
There’s your faulty assumption, Kyra realized. Maines’s handler had convinced him to come to Berlin, but that didn’t mean his handler was stationed in Berlin itself. “The Russians might have sold it to Maines as an out-of-country meeting,” she said. “Assume the Russians considered him a high-value asset,” Kyra started. “His case file would be compartmented. Not everyone would know about him. The man I talked to on the roof was older, a graybeard. He had to be a senior officer. Maybe somebody who came from Moscow just to meet with Maines?” The Russian Embassy to Berlin was enormous, large enough to shelter a thousand intelligence officers. So the man from the roof either was new enough to Berlin that the Germans and CIA officers here had no photograph of him yet or he had never been recognized as an intelligence officer at all, she decided. A short-term visitor senior enough to be read into Maines’s compartment… at least senior enough to be running him. But which intel service? The Russians had eleven, not so many as her own country, but enough to complicate the problem.
“Maybe,” Barron agreed. “But if he’s an intel officer, he would have to be from one of the Russian services that runs foreign assets abroad,” he said, following her silent line of thinking. “That eliminates most of them.”
“The two largest that qualify would be the SVR and the GRU,” Kyra added. The Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki was Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service and the one that seemed the most likely. But there was still the GRU, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian military. Far larger than the SVR and, she’d heard, more ruthless, if that was possible. She suspected it was. The GRU controlled the Spetsnaz, for the most part. Kyra dearly hoped that she would never have to tangle with one of the Kremlin’s Special Forces soldiers. There were few men in the world trained so well in the dark arts of covert military operations. She had been in a few fights during her short career and come out of them well enough. The Agency had trained her in self-defense and she’d studied Krav Maga and some other disciplines on her own time and dime, but she had no illusions how long she would fare in a fight with one of Russia’s most elite soldiers.
“Strelnikov was GRU,” Barron said. “He was Spetsnaz, once upon a time, and the GRU controlled a lot of the Spetsnaz units back in the old days.”
Kyra picked up Maines’s file and looked through the papers twice, but nothing caught her attention. She looked at the dead-drop letter again.
The answer finally broke through her subconscious mind. “Do we know who left Maines’s dead drop in the woods at Banshee Reeks? It’s not in the file.”
“Yes, a GRU officer, Russian military intelligence,” Barron replied. “The Bureau’s going to pick him up the next time he leaves their embassy grounds. He’s probably got diplomatic immunity, so State’s going to declare him persona non grata and send him home. I don’t remember his name… those Russian names all sound alike to me. But I can look it up.”
“Actually, it wasn’t his name I needed, just the intel service.”
Jon nodded. “Bring up the files on the GRU leadership,” he suggested. “There are probably hundreds on the list, but might as well start at the top and work down.”