“It’s oh-five-hundred. You should get moving,” Barron advised.
“Just give me a minute, okay?”
“Don’t be long.”
Barron marched out of the room. Kyra leaned forward, resting her folded arms on the table, and she laid her head on them, suddenly more tired than she could ever remember being. You should have stayed with me, Jon, stayed behind the wall, she thought. I need your help, old man. A flood of anxiety rushed into her chest. She fought it down, but the horrifying thought that maybe, just maybe, she was wrong about everything refused to leave her.
Kyra evicted the thoughts, ignored the angry doubts in her chest, and held herself together long enough to fetch her bag from the hotel. Ten minutes after, she was sitting next to Barron in a SUV, pulling out onto the road for the airport. Kyra watched the Berlin embassy recede and wondered again whether she shouldn’t give up the fight.
There were seats for more than twenty-five around the long table, but the real governing quorum numbered far fewer and most of them were not present today.
Anatoly Maksimovich Grigoriyev had never pined for the old Soviet Union, but the room had always struck the director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) as too ostentatious, a showpiece that sent the wrong message to the Russian people when the cameras were on. National security was not a subject to be discussed in a place like this. Too soft, he thought, too indulgent. The people should have seen them meet in a war room, a Spartan place with few comforts that would portray an image of sacrifice and resolve. The floor was dark wood with a geometric parquet pattern running through it. Square columns of dark marble topped with gold capitals stood out against the brown and cream colors that dominated the rest of the room. The front of the room displayed the Russian coat of arms, the two-headed dragon, gold with a red shield mounted high on the wall and flanked on each side by the country’s flags. The crowning irony of the place was an ornate chandelier above the table that could have been at home in a czar’s palace.
But the cameras were not on, not this time. There were four men in the room and the subject of the meeting was not for anyone’s ears but theirs. The president of the Russian Federation, a former FSB director himself, sat at the table’s head. The foreign minister and Arkady Lavrov sat to his right. Grigoriyev was quite sure that his position alone on the left side was symbolic.
“Good afternoon, friends,” the president said. Polite responses were uttered. “I believe that we are here at your request, Anatoly?”
“Yes, but I don’t need to tell any of you why I have asked to meet, I am sure,” Grigoriyev replied.
“Then there is nothing to discuss, Anatoly,” Lavrov said. “The GRU does not answer—”
“The FSB is responsible for the internal security of the state,” Grigoriyev continued, cutting Lavrov off midsentence. “We perform the counterintelligence mission on Russian soil. This is not in dispute. Therefore, I want to know why I was not informed that the GRU had a source inside the CIA that provided a list of all CIA officers currently in Moscow.”
“Obviously, for reasons of operational security,” Lavrov replied. “Our source is a sensitive one. We could not risk exposing him by sharing the information with the FSB in advance of the announcement.”
“There should have been no announcement without consulting me first!” Grigoriyev protested. “And I want to know why our foreign minister cooperated with Arkady in withholding that information while he instructed our ambassador to Washington to tell the U.S. president that we would be expelling all of those officers from our soil.” In truth, Grigoriyev already knew the answer. The foreign minister was a Lavrov protégé. Grigoriyev simply wanted to see whether the man would have the good sense to appear embarrassed that he’d allowed the GRU chairman to co-opt his ministry so easily. It seemed he did. The minister avoided Grigoriyev’s gaze and remained silent.
The president came to his defense. “Anatoly, I think the greater question here is why the GRU had to do the FSB’s duty?”
“Are you accusing me of incompetence?” Grigoriyev countered. “You were the FSB director once, you understand that the CIA is not a club of amateurs. Even in the old days, when we were the KGB and recruited Americans abroad, we never had a source who gave up so much at once. I do not know who this source is, but I doubt very much that Arkady recruited him. No, this is not incompetence on the part of my people. I think it is merely good fortune, a volunteer who came to Arkady’s doorstep.”
“That does not matter,” Lavrov said, dismissive. “How the man became our asset does not change the fact that such a source must be protected. You have seen the list of people we have expelled. You know that everyone you suspected was a CIA officer was on it, and many more who you did not.”
“Protected?” Grigoriyev snorted in derision. “Do you truly imagine that the Americans do not know exactly who your source is now? And if you are wrong about him being a genuine defector?” Grigoriyev asked. “How have you verified this source and his information? What if he is lying? Do you realize what you have done if this all proves to be falsehoods?”
“It is not—”
“Open the file to me so that I can verify that for myself,” Grigoriyev demanded.
Lavrov exhaled in mock exasperation and shook his head in a display of equally false sympathy. “I think that you are simply concerned that you were made to look the fool, Anatoly,” he said. “The GRU has earned the glory that you think should belong to the FSB and now you want a share of something you haven’t earned.”
“What I want is the opportunity for my people to fulfill their duty to protect the Rodina and her interests,” Grigoriyev retorted. He turned toward the Russian president. “How can we be sure that this asset was not a dangle or a double agent if we cannot see the file? If that is the case, then expelling all of those Americans will have been a terrible blunder—”
“How so?” the president asked, clearly not interested in the answer.
“The Americans will surely respond in kind. They will expel any number of our people from the United States and disrupt our operations there. If the names that Arkady was given were not, in fact, all CIA officers and merely some easily replaced consular officers, then we could suffer more damage than the Americans—”
“That will not be the case,” Lavrov assured the president. “My asset’s information is reliable. By tomorrow evening, the CIA will not have a single officer left on Moscow’s soil. They know that we know their identities and none of them will risk arrest and imprisonment by staying. Yes, they will certainly expel some of our people from their country, but not so many. With no comparable asset, they could only guess at who our officers are. Unless they are prepared to expel our entire delegation, which would be unthinkable except in war, whatever damage they inflict on us will be less than what we have done to them, so we will be able to reconstitute our operations more quickly. We will have a significant advantage in intelligence operations for at least a decade to come.”
“I must agree, Anatoly,” the Russian president said. “Do not let your old competition with Arkady blind you to the opportunity that this source presented us. The information that Arkady has given us is truly impressive. We could not wait.”
“We could not wait?” Grigoriyev said. “Then you knew also?”