Lavrov finished the bottle and set it on the table in front of the parched American. “Do you understand what I am saying to you?” he asked. “Treason is not a sin for which one can atone. Once you have told the enemy what he should not know, you can never control where that information will go. So there is no restitution you can make. Perhaps you believe that you have done it for some virtuous reason, or perhaps you were just a selfish man. But the fact is that you have hurt your country in a way that will never heal. It will try to compensate for your choice, try to rebuild what you have torn down, but the true effects cannot be undone.” The Russian shook his head, frowning.
“You made me tell you more than I wanted,” Maines said, his words slightly slurred. The morphine dosage running through him was too high for his body mass, and his mind was foggy. The man would likely end up addicted to the drug.
Lavrov smiled, incredulous. “You surprise me. You, a case officer, and you do not understand the control that an intelligence service has over an asset who has placed himself in its care?”
“I didn’t want to be in your care,” Maines protested as strongly as the morphine allowed. “I didn’t want to defect. You set me up.”
“Yes, I did,” Lavrov said. “But you made it possible, and, I must admit, quite easy. You are not a clever man, Mr. Maines. You are an educated man, but not a clever one. And that is a terrible failing in an intelligence officer, one I never saw in CIA officers before. The Main Enemy’s operatives used to be so cunning. But you… a failure of training, maybe?” The Russian stopped short, then smiled, as though some great insight had appeared in his mind. “Perhaps I was wrong. The CIA has forgotten its own past victories? The tactics that let them win the Cold War? Perhaps some bits of knowledge can be forgotten after all.”
Lavrov finished the bottle and set it carefully on the desk. “That is the other interesting fact about information… it does not care how it is spread. It can be given and it can be taken. How one obtains it is immaterial, the information is the same. And you put yourself in a position where your information could be taken from you, where you could not protect it or call on others to help you do so… another terrible sin for an intelligence officer. Perhaps not so serious a form of treason as giving the information away, but a sin nonetheless. To put yourself in the care of others and then think you can decide what to share and what to hide? Naïveté of the worst kind.”
“You’re a lunatic,” Maines dared to say, the words so slurred that Lavrov almost couldn’t understand them.
“No, I am not a lunatic, Mr. Maines,” Lavrov said. “I am just more clever than you, which is why you are sitting in my office with a crippled hand and a head full of drugs. But I am not an ungrateful man. Quite the opposite, I am very grateful to you for giving me Miss Stryker’s name, and telling me about the CIA’s Red Cell. I was not aware that such a unit existed. A group of analysts whose job is to consider the improbable possibilities, to go beyond the intelligence on the page and apply history to the present? Brilliant. I must set up such a unit within the GRU… that is another reason I should like to talk to Miss Stryker. Do you think she might consider working for me?”
“I think,” Maines slurred, “that she’ll tell you where you can go and what you can do to yourself while you’re waiting to arrive.”
“Indeed,” Lavrov said, glee in his voice. “But such a unit must be willing to speak truth to the authorities, no? Have the courage to say what no one else wants to say? That is so rare here… so rare anywhere really.” He stood up, turned to the window, and looked out into the dark at the Kremlin lights. “It should not be so. The authorities always learn eventually that they have been told lies. Do you read history, Mr. Maines?” He waited for a few seconds but the American didn’t answer. “There is a story from the Second Great War… I do not know if it’s true,” Lavrov continued. “After the Normandy invasion, Hitler’s generals were afraid to tell him day after day of the Reich’s many defeats in the final year of the war. So instead, they told him day after day that his armies were winning great victories, killing American, British, and Russian soldiers in large numbers. After many days of this, Hitler finally said, ‘If we are winning so many victories, why do the battles keep getting closer to Berlin?’ ”
Lavrov laughed. “Truth wins the day eventually. Better to hear it early rather than late when there is little that can be done about it.”
The Russian sighed. “Yes, better not to delay.” Lavrov called out and an aide strode into the room. The general pulled out a notepad and scribbled a name on the paper, then tore it out and gave it to the functionary. “Contact Colonel Sokolov at the Aquarium and pass him this name. He is waiting for it. And please have the orderlies assist Mr. Maines back to his dormitory. He is not feeling well, and the sleep will do him some good.”
The signal for a meeting was simple, a piece of tape on an iron fence post. If Topilin wanted the meeting, the tape would be vertical. If the CIA officer wanted the meeting, it would be horizontal. Finding the right street and the right post had taken Kyra half the day thanks to her inability to read Russian, but the GPS had finally led her to the spot. She’d come with a roll of tape in hand, but had been surprised to find two vertical stripes — Topilin’s signal for an emergency. Kyra had returned to the safe house after that and pulled up his file on the classified computer, which had taken another hour. His file said that his next steps were to dispose of all incriminating evidence that the Agency had given him, then meet at an exfiltration point in the village of Vyborg, northeast of St. Petersburg near the Russian-Finnish border. His CIA handler would meet him there, where Topilin and his wife would hide in the trunk under a thermal blanket that would mask their body heat from sensors mounted at the border outposts. They would be given a mild sedative to calm their nerves, lest they panic from claustrophobia or some other terror, but that step wasn’t in the actual file.
Vyborg was over five hundred miles from Moscow, a full day’s drive by car. She prayed that Topilin hadn’t left for the village yet. The GPS could lead her to Vyborg, but she doubted she would be able to find a man hiding there. She didn’t even know Topilin’s face. Even if she could find him, the round trip would take two days that she was sure she couldn’t spare. Kyra needed to intercept Topilin before that or he would be beyond her reach as surely as if he’d been captured.
Where to destroy the evidence? Not at home, surely. Kyra knew Topilin’s handler would have counseled against that. Burning plastics gave off an unmistakable smell that could raise suspicions. His file said that he had a dacha. That seemed more likely. It was southwest of the city and therefore somewhat out of his way if he was heading for Vyborg, but she didn’t know enough about the man to know what other options he might have available to him.
Kyra parked a half mile away down a side road and ran through the woods, navigating her way using the map in her head that she had studied, instead of the GPS. The Russian fall was colder than she’d expected, and she felt a chill until she got up to speed, her own body heat warming her. The dacha appeared through the trees after ten minutes or so, a tidy little renovated barn by the looks of it, with a deck coming off the back. A late-model Ford was sitting in front of the house, her view of it partly blocked by one corner of the house. Kyra felt her spirits surge. He’s here—