“Do tell,” Jon said, interest in his voice.
“Late August, the local police pulled a guy out of the water on the other side of the lake, British kid. I’ve got the name… hang on…” Jon heard the rustling pages of a notebook over the receiver. “Graham Longstreet.”
Jon scribbled the name on an index card and handed it to Kyra. She read the name, leaned over a laptop, and began typing. “Okay. That’s it?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” Barron said. “On my way back.”
The call ended and Jon hung up. “You think the Russians took out this British kid too?” Kyra asked.
Jon shrugged. “Could be a coincidence,” he admitted. “Got anything?”
“The obituary,” Kyra said. She pulled up the web page detailing the young man’s demise and scanned the report. “It says he drowned, names the usual surviving family, loved hiking and environmental causes.”
“He loved hiking,” Jon said, his voice quiet. “Did he have a web page? A blog? Facebook or Instagram accounts?”
Kyra clicked the computer’s mouse a few times. “Yeah, a web page… looks like he was one of those guys who likes exploring abandoned sites. He’s got pictures here from the Six Flags park in New Orleans, the one that got wiped out by Hurricane Katrina a decade ago. Here’s some from Pripyat, Ukraine. That was a whole city that got abandoned after Chernobyl in ’86. I would’ve run from that one, too. There’s a bunch of others here… Willard Asylum in New York, Canfranc Rail Station in Spain, Château Miranda in Belgium.” Kyra scrolled through the online album, disbelieving. “I guess everyone needs a hobby, but this is morbid. These places look like sets for horror movies.”
Jon leaned in over her shoulder. “Any abandoned sites like that in Germany on his list?”
Kyra scanned through the entire list. “None that he visited.” She looked up at her mentor. “Maybe he was here to correct that little problem.”
Jon smiled at her. “Search it.”
Kyra turned back to the keyboard and began typing.
ABANDONED SITES GERMANY
The search results appeared and Kyra scrolled through the list. “Amazing how many places just get left to rot,” she said, awe in her voice. “Half of these sites were built by the Russians during the Cold War and then abandoned after the Wall fell in ’89.”
“Any within an hour’s drive north of Berlin?” Jon asked.
Kyra needed five minutes to find the answer. “Vogelsang Soviet Military Base. It’s enormous. They housed fifteen thousand men and their families there, and somehow the Agency and every other Western intel agency missed it for years. Looks like the kind of place where an abandoned-site junkie would have on his bucket list.”
“And every other sane person on the planet would want to avoid,” Jon said. “A hundred dollars says that Lavrov was assigned to Vogelsang at some point when he was younger.”
“I’m not a GS-14 like you, so I don’t get paid enough to gamble,” Kyra replied. “So Longstreet goes to Vogelsang a month ago, stumbles across Lavrov or his people, and they kill him to protect whatever they’re doing. They dump the body in the Müggelsee, which is a good two hours away, so nobody comes looking for him around the base,” she offered. “Then, a month later, Strelnikov gets lured out there, and they follow the same procedure.”
“Not a bad theory,” Jon agreed. “It’s pretty thin on the evidence.”
“We know how to fix that, don’t we?” Kyra asked.
Daniel Rostow had been in this office less than three years, but his youth already was paying the price for his ambition. The end of his first term was still little more than a year out and the man’s brown hair already was streaked through with white. The dark circles under the eyes disappeared only when a makeup artist covered them up before he went before cameras or Congress, and his frame had thinned since his inauguration despite the personal chef and Navy stewards at his disposal. Barron had heard rumors that the doctors were worried about his weight loss and confirmations that Rostow hadn’t seen the inside of the White House gym in over a year. The presidency offered no true downtime, no matter how often the occupant went to Camp David or the putting green or the movie theater in the White House. Aides came and went with tidbits and papers to be signed with no regard for personal time, phone calls had to be taken when they came. Rostow’s schedule was parsed in five-minute increments, with thirty-second meetings scheduled for the times he would be walking from one room to another.
Kathryn Cooke wondered if the man wasn’t suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. She had known many subordinates who endured that. The White House had been sending her case officers into war zones at a rapid clip for more than a decade now, and more than a few had been forced to fire weapons in anger. But any severe, prolonged stress could lead a man down that same road and there was no question that the commander in chief’s job included a daily serving of that. If Rostow had joined that particular club, Cooke was sure the man’s stress evaporated only when he could finally escape into the oblivion of sleep, and then only on the few nights it wouldn’t follow him into his dreams. Her own time struggling to justify to herself the condition her orders had imposed on her people had left Cooke with her own theory as to why so many presidents had affairs. The world thought such dalliances were about power and indulgence. Cooke was sure they were seeking new forms of stress relief.
She wondered whether the paper in Rostow’s hand would send the man off in search of some.
IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR
MOSCOW 76490
1. FURTHER TO REF. RED CELL OFFICER STRYKER ADMITTED TO RUSSIAN EMBASSY BERLIN 1115 HOURS MORNING OF 26 SEPTEMBER. EMBASSY STAFF INITIALLY DENIED THAT CIA DEFECTOR MAINES WAS PRESENT BUT RELENTED AFTER STRYKER PRESENTED CONTRARY EVIDENCE.
2. STRYKER WAS ESCORTED TO EMBASSY ROOF AND INTERVIEWED FOR TEN MINUTES BY SENIOR RUSSIAN OFFICIAL LATER IDENTIFIED AS DIRECTOR GRU ARKADY LAVROV. LAVROV WAS EVASIVE ABOUT ANY ROLE PLAYED IN MAINES’ DEFECTION AND INTIMATED THAT MAINES HAD REQUESTED ASYLUM. STRYKER CAREFULLY SUGGESTED THAT LAVROV ENTERTAIN A DEAL FOR MAINES’ EXTRADITION, BUT HE REFUSED.
3. MAINES WAS ESCORTED TO EMBASSY ROOF AFTER LAVROV’S DEPARTURE, WHERE STRYKER INTERVIEWED HIM FOR TEN MINUTES. MAINES ADMITTED IDENTIFYING RUSSIAN GENERAL STEPAN STRELNIKOV (RET) AS A CIA ASSET TO PROVE BONA FIDES BUT CLAIMED HE HAD NOT BELIEVED THE RUSSIANS WOULD EXECUTE HIM.
4. MAINES ADMITTED THAT HIS RUSSIAN HANDLERS WERE NOT PAYING HIM COMMENSURATE WITH HIS EXPECTATIONS. STRYKER SUGGESTED THAT MAINES CONSIDER RETURNING TO CONUS IN RETURN FOR COMMUTATION OF PRISON SENTENCE. MAINES REFUSED AND MADE A COUNTEROFFER, PROMISING TO NAME NO FURTHER ASSETS IN RETURN FOR A FULL PARDON FROM POTUS FOR ALL OFFENSES COMMITTED AND FIFTY MILLION US DOLLARS. MAINES SET A DEADLINE OF TWENTY-THREE HOURS LOCAL TIME FOR STRYKER TO ARRANGE THE DEAL AND TOLD STRYKER TO STAND IN FRONT OF RUSSIAN EMBASSY BERLIN WEARING A RED JACKET TO SIGNAL THE DEAL WAS ACCEPTED. IF DEAL IS NOT ACCEPTED, MAINES PROMISED TO REVEAL NAMES OF ALL RUSSIAN ASSETS IN A BID TO GAIN AS MUCH GOODWILL WITH HIS RUSSIAN HANDLERS AS POSSIBLE.
5. STRYKER EXPRESSED HER DISPLEASURE AT MAINES’ ACTIONS BUT PROMISED TO INFORM USG OF MAINES’ PROPOSAL.
6. REGARDS. END OF MESSAGE.
Rostow stared at the cable report in his hand and read it twice before looking up. “Having trouble keeping the house in order?”
Cooke ignored the dig. “Defectors are an occupational hazard, but a rare one.”
“Rare?” Rostow asked, disbelieving. “Last I heard, the intelligence community’s had a few dozen moles since ’47.”