“Arkady Vladimirovich.” It was the FSB director.
“Thank you for responding so swiftly.”
“Of course, but you will not like the information I have to report,” Grigoriyev advised. “My counterintelligence officer reports that none of our surveillance teams have observed a woman matching the photograph you provided entering the American Embassy during the last week, or any other embassy of any country allied with the Americans. If she is CIA and still on our soil, then she is operating out of some other location. We are reviewing our files now and drawing up a list of possible sites where she could be.”
Lavrov narrowed his eyes. He’d expected that answer but he disliked it all the same. It would make finding the woman more tedious. “You have my thanks, Anatoly.”
“You will, of course, share any information you obtain concerning her whereabouts with me,” Grigoriyev told him. He didn’t mean it as a request, though he knew Lavrov would tell him nothing.
“Of course. Do svidaniya.”
“Do svidaniya.” The line went dead. Lavrov cradled the phone, then sat in his chair and tried to think through the whiskey-fueled haze that had settled over his mind. He’d drunk too much waiting for that call and now found it difficult to assemble his thoughts.
Stryker is here, but she is not operating out of her country’s embassy or any other. A safe house, then. It had to be, but where?
Grigoriyev’s FSB had the information on that, and Lavrov groaned at the thought of calling his adversary back and having to plead with him for access to those particular files. It would pile shame on humiliation.
Lavrov had considered letting her go and making contact with her in the United States, but that seemed too great a risk. Trying to turn a hostile target on her own home soil could backfire in such spectacular fashion. She had to be brought in.
But does she have to die? Lavrov asked himself. Possibly not. She was an intriguing young lady, and she could be a great help in establishing his own Red Cell in the GRU. He doubted that she would betray her country. She did not seem the type, but he saw no reason not to make her the offer. There was no risk in it for him, and the reward could be a tidy one, however improbable.
But he could not make the pitch until they could talk. So how to find her? he wondered. He stared at the phone, thought about dialing Grigoriyev’s number. There had to be some other way—
Yes, there was another way, and he would have come to it sooner but for the whiskey twisting his thoughts out of shape. The GRU director wondered if Alden Maines might not be willing to give up the information in exchange for some of that fine drink. Probably, Lavrov mused, but why waste it on him? He didn’t need to bribe the American to talk anymore. Fear of the hammer was enough now. He should have asked the traitor about safe houses before but it had not seemed like a priority. With all of the CIA officers forced out, their covert facilities should have been neutralized, left waiting to be identified and sacked at his leisure.
The only questions now were whether Maines had familiarized himself with his former services’ safe-house locations in Moscow, and if the traitor could focus long enough to remember. It was one thing to try to remember information while drinking alcohol. It was another to do so with morphine running through the veins. That brave Spetsnaz officer had done it, but Lavrov suspected that Maines was neither so driven nor so resilient.
He picked up his telephone. “Please tell Mr. Maines that we need to have another conversation in my office. When is he due for his next dose of medication? Very good. Withhold it from him, and let him know that it will be waiting for him when our discussion is done.” Lavrov hung up the phone and retrieved a box of pushpins and a map of greater Moscow from his desk. He wondered how many locations Maines was going to mark down for him.
She had driven for more than an hour into the countryside with the GPS turned off. If she didn’t know where she was, she figured the Russians wouldn’t be able to predict her path either. They were going to try to triangulate on the signal she was about to send and she didn’t want them to have any kind of head start if they had any clue what neighborhood the safe house was in. Kyra’s sense of direction was good and always had been. It was one of the blessings granted by a childhood growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where back roads were plentiful and the sun and landmarks were hidden more often than not by the forests that swallowed the gravel roads where she’d learned to drive. Moscow was behind her to the east, and Kyra was reminded how similar the world always looked when there were no signs in foreign languages to remind her that she wasn’t home.
She stopped the truck on some side road, barely a dirt trail that probably belonged to some farmer, and sat in the cab until the sun slipped down below the horizon and the world around her went dark. The Russian stars looked no different from those she’d watched in Virginia as a girl. She was in the right hemisphere to see the familiar constellations. In a few hours, the same sky would hover over her home in the United States, but the thought did nothing to calm her anxiety. The darkness felt oppressive, like it was Lavrov’s personal ally.
She spent the afternoon in the cab of the truck, sleeping on and off, her mind unwilling to let her go for more than an hour at a time. She stepped outside, stretched, ate what little food was in her pack, and then sat in the grass, trying to reason her way through the situation. In truth, there was only one course of action. She only had the name of one final asset and only one means of communicating with him. Kyra crawled back into the cab and lay on the seat. The hours passed by slowly, and she faded out in the truck again, a deep sleep this time. She awoke to see the Milky Way above her head, a sight that was always washed out back home by the light pollution of Leesburg. Stars were everywhere, the sky alive with a picture of the entire galaxy that stretched out above her in all directions. The sight was peaceful and she stared at it for an hour before deciding to move.
Kyra loaded the shortwave transmitter into the backpack, extending the rubber antenna through the port on the top of the pack. She pulled out an LED light and turned it on, pushing the night away from her path and wincing at how bright the beam was. The woman looked around, but saw no lights anywhere in the distance that could suggest another person was anywhere within her line of sight.
There was a hill a quarter mile beyond and she hiked through the grass until she reached it. It was steep but not especially high, less than two hundred feet to the summit, with rocks and roots bursting out of the dirt. Kyra reached the top in less than thirty minutes, checking her watch at a constant rate as she climbed. She was almost out of time and she wanted to get as much altitude as possible before she had to reach out to the asset.
The man’s name was Colonel Semyon Petrovich Zhitomirsky. The file said that he was a GRU chief of staff in some office whose name meant nothing to her, but which had some dealings with the Foundation for Advanced Research. Kyra honestly did not know what kind of access the man might have, but he was her last hope as far as she could see. The other assets on the now-vaporized list were all positioned further and further from the Foundation that seemed to be the center of Lavrov’s operation. If Zhitomirsky could not help her, she was out of options.
Kyra set herself and the backpack on the grass. Crossing her legs, she opened up the pack and turned on the shortwave transmitter. The screen lit up the darkness. The communications plan Zhitomirsky’s handler had set up for him five years earlier called for him to monitor a shortwave frequency once a month using a small radio the Agency had provided. Once a month, on the day corresponding to the number of the month—1 January, 2 February, 3 March, until year’s end — the Russian would turn on his radio for one hour beginning at nine o’clock. The handler would speak only one word, a woman’s name, either “Olga,” “Anna,” or “Nina,” each of which would tell the man which meeting site they would use.