“The Germans swept Vogelsang over,” Barron told her. “The test site you reported was clean. They found a fair amount of blood where Jon went down, but nothing else.” It had been eighteen hours since the young woman had outrun the Spetsnaz.
“Did he bleed out?” she asked, her voice as empty as her eyes.
“They can’t tell,” Barron admitted. “The ground was still wet from the rain… they couldn’t tell how much blood might’ve soaked into the dirt.”
“No leads off that pistol?”
“I gave it to the Germans. The serial number was filed off and the ballistics on it didn’t match anything on file. I’m not surprised. Those Makarovs are the Russian version of the Saturday night special. They’re so common that just finding one doesn’t narrow down the field of suspects,” Barron reported. “And Lavrov is gone. The Bundeskriminalamt says he took off for Moscow this morning… took an embassy car to the airport and the plane had diplomatic protection too. Without any physical evidence tying him to a crime, the Germans didn’t feel they had enough evidence to even ask the Russian government to hold him in the country, much less withdraw his diplomatic immunity. Your testimony alone wasn’t enough to convince them.”
“Was Maines with him?”
“The Germans aren’t sure. Fifteen men traveled with Lavrov. He drove out to the airport in a caravan… one town car and two full-size vans. Maines could’ve been in one of them. The Russians do disguise work as well as we do,” Barron said. “But the Germans couldn’t even get a good look inside the hangar, much less the people or cargo he took with him. They don’t know who or what Lavrov loaded onto his plane before it took off.”
Kyra nodded. “What now?”
Barron sat down next to the younger woman, tempted to put his hand on her back. He refrained, not knowing how she would interpret the gesture. He couldn’t tell if she was hiding her emotions, or simply had no energy left to feel anything at all. “We go home.”
“What?”
Barron offered her a sheet of paper. “We got a cable from Langley. Maines gave up the name of everyone in Moscow Station, every single one. And the Russians figured out that I was Agency a long time ago, so I can’t get in there. POTUS has ordered the FBI and the DNI to hit the Russians back,” he said. “The Bureau has an open season on every Russian intel officer on U.S. soil, no bag limit. The DNI wants us to disrupt every Russian covert op we know of. Sounds like POTUS wants his own covert spy war.”
He expected an explosion from her, some loud expression of satisfaction. Kyra reacted not at all as she read the paper. “My name isn’t on here.”
“Makes sense,” Barron said with a shrug. “You were never assigned to Moscow Station. What’s it matter?” He was sure that he would find the answer disturbing, no matter what it was.
“I could go in. I’m not on Maines’s list.”
“Not a chance,” Barron observed. “Maines knows who you are, and I’m sure Lavrov has your picture from the surveillance cameras at the embassy.”
“I was in disguise. I can wear a different one going into Moscow.”
Barron shook his head. “Even if you could get in, what’s the point? In twenty-four hours, there won’t be anyone in Moscow who can help you,” he protested. “You couldn’t possibly save all of our assets over there by yourself. You’d be lucky if you could get to any one of them before the FSB or Lavrov’s people did. The Russians have thousands of counterintelligence and security officers. And you don’t know the exfiltration plans for any of our assets even if you could get to them.”
“We can’t just walk,” Kyra said, her voice quiet and flat. She lifted her head and looked at the clandestine service director.
“Three years in the Red Cell has messed with your head. You’d be lucky to stay out of Lubyanka or whatever other hole the Russians use these days,” Barron said after a moment’s thought. “I can’t begin to count all of the things that could go wrong. You have no plan, you would have no close support. The losses we’re going to take are bad enough. I’m not in the habit of giving the Russians freebies.”
“That’s exactly what we’d be giving them. We stand back and Lavrov just takes out all of those assets for free,” Kyra countered. “And then he’ll have a clear road for the next decade to keep giving away stealth technology and nuclear weapons designs and EMP bombs. Maybe the Brits or the Israelis will shut some of it down, but they don’t have the resources to go after the GRU everywhere on the planet.”
“Nice argument. That’s not why you want to go.”
“No, it’s not,” Kyra admitted after a long silence, her voice quiet.
“So why?”
The woman turned her head away from the senior officer. “Lavrov and those Spetsnaz soldiers are the only ones who know what happened to Jon.” Kyra stared down at the floor, then looked back up at Barron. “I know that the mission always comes first,” she admitted. “I know that you would never approve a mission like this just to find out whether Jon’s still alive. But he saved my life, last year, in Venezuela. I infiltrated that base where the Iranians were building their bomb. But their security came out, sweeping the buildings, and I was about to get overrun. Jon was up in the hills and he held off a whole regiment of soldiers with a sniper rifle, one of those big .50-caliber monsters that you use to destroy trucks and equipment.” Kyra’s gaze was distant, like the memory she was describing was playing out on the wall in front of her. She smiled for the first time in days, amused at something only she could see. “He refused to shoot anybody… made a good show of killing jeeps, though. Steam and oil spraying everywhere. But he wouldn’t kill anyone. He’d done that before, in Iraq during the war, and it still haunted him, so he refused to do it again. Probably saved the president from an international mess, too… but he could handle that rifle… ended up in a snipers’ gunfight a day later with an Iranian Special Forces soldier. Jon was amazing.”
The personal movie of her memory ended and Kyra’s focus returned to the room. She looked at Barron, focused on his face again. “I have to know what happened to him. If they did kill Jon and we don’t try something, they’ll never pay for it, and…” She stopped to force back a sob. It took her much longer than she’d expected, almost a minute. Barron refused to break the silence. “… and how am I supposed to live with that?”
“You’ll learn.”
“How can you know that?”
Barron smiled, rueful. “I was chief of Moscow Station years ago. You ever hear how my tour ended?” Kyra shook her head. “I was running a night op with one of my officers, Manuela Saconi. I was driving. We were going to use a jack-in-the-box so she could bail out to meet an asset. The FSB had a bug up its butt about something and we drew three cars that night. One of them was aggressive… got right up on our rear quarter. The driver had to swerve for I-don’t-know-what, turned right into us, and spun me out. Our car rolled, I don’t know, five or six times. Ellie died on the scene, massive head trauma, even with her seat belt and airbag. I ended up in a Russian hospital, concussion, major laceration on my scalp. They found the jack-in-the-box in the wreckage. Kathy Cooke’s predecessor worked out a deal with the FSB to keep it all quiet. The Agency recalled me and the Kremlin never declared me persona non grata and made sure the local news never covered the story. Ellie got shipped home and was buried before I ever left the hospital in Moscow. But I was furious. I wanted the Russians to apologize, to admit they’d screwed up. Took me a long time, but I realized that wasn’t going to happen. I came to see it was for the best… that took longer. It’s a funny game. The other side screws up and we help them save face, because if we don’t, they’ll do it anyway by coming after our people and making a big show when they catch one.”