Rostow looked at the phone, replied nothing, then looked away. He pushed himself back from the desk, crossed his hands in his lap. “And you’re sure about this connection with Arkady Lavrov?” he asked.
“We have a high level of confidence in that assessment,” Cooke concurred. “The woman who met with Lavrov on the roof of the Russian Embassy was Jon’s partner, Kyra Stryker. She was the other officer who recovered the Iranian warhead last year, by the way.” That bit of news heightened Rostow’s discomfort. She wished that Jon and Kyra could have seen it. “NSA says that Lavrov signed Strelnikov’s travel orders to Berlin. Then Lavrov flew to Berlin the day before Strelnikov left, requesting emergency counterterrorism meetings with the German Federal Intelligence Service… some crap story about Chechen rebels trying to smuggle arms through Berlin. Given Lavrov’s connections, he probably could have faked that if he needed cover for the trip.”
Rostow nodded, almost unconsciously. Cooke studied the commander in chief’s face, trying to divine some clue as to his thoughts. He’s actually taking CIA seriously. It was a rare thing.
But Rostow’s face hardly moved and Barron could do nothing but listen to the white noise coming from the phone speaker as Jon held his peace four thousand miles away. Rostow stared down at his desk for a full five minutes, saying nothing.
The president finally looked up. “No.”
“Sir?” Cooke asked.
“No deal. No pardon, no money, no nothing,” Rostow said. “Maines can enjoy life in Moscow until the Russians off him or he can come home and take his chances.”
Jon was smart enough not to protest over the phone. Cooke took her time assembling her thoughts and finding the most politic way to tell Rostow what she thought of the young president’s decision.
“Mr. President, Jon was correct when he said we can tell you about the implications of decisions, and it’s my duty to tell you now the implications of the one you’ve just made. Sir, if we don’t make this deal with Maines, people will start dying in short order, ours and theirs. The FSB or the GRU will begin arresting Russians working for us, one after another, and they will be executed, without exception. We will be forced to try to exfiltrate as many as we can, but we will fail to save most of them. We won’t have the time, the people, or the resources, so we will be forced to improvise. But we will be operating on Russian soil and the Russians have, without question, the most efficient, skilled, and ruthless counterintelligence operation in the world. So our creativity will fall short, and some of our people will be captured and arrested. They will be paraded on Russian television and photographed for Russian newspapers. The secretary of state and the U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation will be forced to negotiate for their release. No matter what we do, our operations in Moscow will be gutted for years to come and the United States will be humiliated on a global stage.” Cooke finally stopped speaking. Jon was afraid to add anything at all.
Rostow nodded. The president seemed calm and serious. Arrogance was the one emotion Cooke could read well and Rostow had no shortage of it, but she saw none in him at the moment. The man was trying to be sincere, or at least as honest as he could be. “Kathy, I don’t doubt anything you said. Not one word,” Rostow said. “But the people who sit on this side of this desk don’t get to think small, and cutting big deals with hostile nations to save a person here and there is almost always a mistake. I give Maines a pardon and the next Snowden wannabe will see it and think he can jump ship for Russia or China or who-knows-where the next time his agency does something to offend his sensibilities because he’ll expect us to forgive everything just to shut him up.”
Across the Atlantic, six answers formed in Jon’s mind to rebut the president. He considered what Kyra would say, and fought down the urge to speak.
“I’m not a fan of CIA,” Rostow continued. “I’ve never made that a secret, but I’m not stupid enough to think that this country doesn’t need it or NSA or any of the other agencies, no matter what sins you people have committed in the past. But you can’t run an intelligence community where every officer in it thinks he can toss his secrecy oath out with his classified trash in a burn bag. So Maines gets nothing. And if men die and it goes public, the next Snowdon disciple won’t have any doubts about the price he’ll have to pay for switching teams. Do your best to save our people and our assets. If you can’t, I won’t hold you responsible.”
Cooke didn’t believe he meant the last sentence, but kept her face still. “Yes, sir.”
Cooke said nothing on the walk to the Agency car waiting outside on West Executive Avenue. She closed the door and the armored vehicle began to move. She picked up the secure phone mounted between the front seats and dialed a number she had learned by heart in the last two days.
“That was not what I was expecting,” Jon said, no pleasantries first. The crypto played games with his voice, stripping it of what little warmth she’d ever heard in it.
“You thought he’d make the deal?” Cooke asked.
“No. Turning us down, that I expected. I didn’t expect Rostow to actually listen to us.”
“He didn’t, until I told him you helped capture that nuke last year,” Cooke said. “Presidents don’t often talk to the people whom they almost killed with their stupidity. That was probably the first time he’s ever shared words with someone his political ambitions directly hurt. I don’t know if it will last, but at least he made his decision on the merits for once.” Cooke watched a class of schoolchildren cross Constitution Avenue, making their way to the Lincoln Memorial.
“So did he turn us down because he really believes in the decision, or is he just trying to put a shank in your ribs?”
“The former, I think. He’s probably right, about not making the deal,” she said. “It would be the clean, easy solution now, but it would set us up for more trouble later.”
“Doesn’t matter now either way,” Jon replied. “And there will always be another Edward Snowden or Edward Lee Howard whether we cut a deal with Maines or not.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Cooke agreed, rueful. “But it’s not the future traitors we have to worry about now, just the one in Berlin today.” She exhaled hard and looked out the car window. The trees along the George Washington Parkway had exploded into their full palette of reds, oranges, and yellows. Along with the temperature, the leaves would start falling soon. “I want you and Kyra to work with Barron and figure out which assets are likely to be first on the Kremlin’s list. Prioritize who needs to be saved—”
“And who we hang out in the wind?” Jon interrupted.
“Something like that,” Cooke admitted. “It might help if we knew what kind of technology Lavrov is selling now, and who the customer is.”
“We’re working on that.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The village of Vogelsang barely qualified for the title. The outpost was a tiny borough, not sixty miles west of the Polish border and home to fewer than a thousand people. Kyra suspected that only the solar-energy farm that dominated the southwestern quarter kept the place on the map. The only other site of interest was a deserted facility to the northwest that the Germans here were trying very hard to forget altogether.