The customs officer was disinterested in the American woman to the point of incivility. The lack of attention, forged documents, and her light disguise — this one changing her into a dark redhead, flat-chested, with wide hips and a round face — granted her admittance into the country without getting called into a private room for a special interview.
Kyra had settled on her method of reaching the safe house before leaving Berlin. Drivers for hire were lined up near the rental car desks. She’d considered one. She didn’t read Cyrillic and the Russians’ refusal to post English highway signs or obey their own traffic laws was going to make navigation problematic. But the Moscow Rules decreed that everyone is potentially under opposition control and she wasn’t going to give herself to the FSB or the GRU so quickly. The embassy would have its own fleet of vehicles, but improvisation was going to be the order of the day for this operation and having a car the Russians didn’t associate with diplomats would prove useful.
The Russian government allowed foreigners staying less than six months to use their own countries’ driver’s licenses so long as they had a notarized Russian translation attached. Both were forgeries. The Russian police were known to stop drivers here for no reason at all, but she could risk that. An expert would have been hard-pressed to detect fake documents of this quality. No local traffic cop would manage it standing on the road with his own eyes the only tools at his disposal.
The Volkswagen Tiguan was the last SUV available at the Avis rental desk, and the most expensive transport they had, but Kyra was sure that Langley wasn’t going to quibble over prices. Barron’s checkbook was open for this trip, which was no small favor. The Tiguan was going to swallow petrol like a parched bull drinking water from the trough on a hot Virginia day, but if Kyra was going to risk surveillance and detention by one of the most efficient intelligence services in the world, she wanted a car with four-wheel drive and as much horsepower as she could buy. She’d been chased before. She knew better than to lose one of those races by choosing an underpowered car that was useless off the paved roads.
She’d memorized the major roads leading into the city on the map in her pack, but she paid for the GPS unit anyway. She didn’t know whether the FSB could track it, but if her memory failed her, she wasn’t going to spend the next week driving the Moscow streets, hoping to stumble across the safe house. To be fair, that level of incompetence might actually convince them that she was not a spy.
Kyra dropped the handle on her rolling bag, tossed it into the passenger seat, and started the Tiguan. She put her hand on the drive lever and pulled it down, then looked at her dashboard to make sure the truck was in reverse.
The gauges were labeled in Cyrillic.
This is not a good idea.
Kyra exhaled in exasperation as she heard Jon chiding her in her mind. That warning had become his habit and she supposed that he’d never been wrong, technically, despite her successes. Even fools were owed a few victories, she supposed, but she was finally coming to see the truth of his adage that bravery was no substitute for wisdom. If there was any operation that would settle the question, it would be this one. The Russian military may have degraded in the years after the Soviet Union had dissolved, but the security services never had. They had changed names and shapes, allegiances and org charts… no, in truth they had become the Kremlin, with only the blurred lines between them and organized crime to confuse that fact.
You shouldn’t have come here, Jon’s voice told her.
God hates a coward, she told him yet again in her mind.
Jon hadn’t been a coward. Gonna make you proud, old man, she decided.
Kyra put the truck in gear and drove out of the rental lot onto the airport road.
The safe house was twenty-five miles from the airport, but Kyra’s surveillance detection route had taken four hours to drive. She’d watched the safe house for another two before deciding it was unwatched and undisturbed, but she was still worried the FSB was simply more patient than she was.
She’d cursed in amazement when she saw it. The last safe house she’d seen had been a small apartment in a Caracas slum. This one was a mansion by Moscow standards. A hand-cut stone walkway curved around on a trim green lawn with shade trees and streetlamps for illumination. The exterior of the house was yellow with white brick at the corners and Roman columns that reached up two stories at the front door. A two-car garage connected at a right angle on the side. A black iron fence and high bushes surrounded the property. The estate would not have been out of place in one of the nicer neighborhoods of Loudoun County in northern Virginia, where she lived almost five thousand miles to the west. Kyra was sure that she’d driven off course somewhere, not believing the Agency’s largesse extended so far, until the front gate accepted the code Barron had given her in Berlin and moved aside for her truck.
How do they maintain cover on this place? She knew better than to ask such questions aloud back at headquarters.
She parked the Tiguan in the garage and closed that door by hand, hiding the vehicle, then pulled her luggage out of the passenger seat and entered the house by the mudroom door. The building was mostly hidden from the street by darkness, distance, and the bushes, but Barron had counseled her to stay indoors anyway.
The door leading into the house from the mudroom was locked. It looked nondescript, but the locks were heavy and the door and frame both were reinforced with steel.
There was a keypad by the door, twelve black squares with no labels. She pressed a button and the squares lit up, each with a number assigned in random order. No doubt the numbers would be in a different order the next time she came in. The system was designed to prevent anyone from deciphering the entry code by watching the user enter it from a distance and guessing the numbers by following the movement of the hand.
Kyra entered the second code that Barron had given her and the door clicked open.
The mudroom connected with the kitchen, long shadows stretching out on the hardwood floor as the sun moved down behind the bush line. Kyra stopped and listened, not moving for almost a full minute and hearing nothing. She found it strange, but she was grateful that the safe house would be empty. Otherwise, some caretaker would have asked her to nazovite sebya with some Russian pass phrase she would have mangled even if Barron had taught it to her hours before.
The Caracas safe house had been a tiny, ugly little space, barely eight hundred square feet with old furnishings, rusting gas heaters, and mold growing in the corners. This house was enormous by comparison, five thousand square feet spread across three levels, the entire space clean, the furnishings modern. A library on the main floor was stocked with both Russian and English books, and the kitchen had better equipment than Kyra’s own home in Virginia. The refrigerator was empty, but the pantry and cabinets had enough canned goods to keep her fed for weeks.
Dinner was instant polenta, which she found in the pantry and cooked on the stove. Kyra was no brilliant chef, but her mother had insisted that her daughter could not call herself a proper southern girl if she didn’t know how to make a bowl of grits. It was likely the only taste of home she would get here, but it did nothing to soothe her dark spirits. There was an unsettled feeling in the quiet darkness that the comfort food could not dispel and Kyra wondered whether the spirits of dead case officers or assets might not be keeping her company. There seemed to be voices in her head that were not her own.