The secure phone called for Barron’s attention. He’d come to hate the machine over the years. The mere fact that he needed a phone that could encrypt a conversation was evidence that there were enemies who would listen if they could and use what they learned to hurt his country. Barron had come to that realization early in his career and he’d started to see more such proof everywhere he looked. The guards at the gates, the badge readers at the entrances, metal doors to every vault, locks on every door. But soon he’d seen that it wasn’t just the physical barriers. The training courses, incessant reminders of “need to know” and “honor the oath,” the very artwork on the walls that paid tribute to great operations of the past where Agency officers had done unto others what the Agency desperately was trying to ensure would never happen to its own. Even the classification markings on every sheet of paper that he handled every day, dictating who did and didn’t qualify to read the information… all reminders that hatred for the United States was a constant in the world outside.
The head of the Directorate of Operations wished that he’d never had that particular epiphany. Langley was a jail of steel, glass, fiberoptic lines, and paper, and like any true prison, someone who served time became institutionalized… accustomed, even dependent on the culture it imposed, unable to adjust to the world outside, where people were free to speak what they knew. So many retired, only to come back as contractors or consultants. Others went downtown to other jobs where they could earn more but stay in CIA’s orbit. Just different prisons in the same system.
Barron had better plans. He’d long since exceeded whatever youthful ambitions he’d harbored and the loftier heights within his reach held no appeal. There was a Montana farm with his name on the deed and the day he gave his blue badge to the security office would be the last time he saw Langley. Whatever neighbors he met north of Billings were never going to know that the man who’d moved in had spent his life fighting Russians and Chinese and terrorists in the dark corners of the world.
The phone sounded for the fourth time, shaking him out of his thoughts. “Barron.”
“This is the Ops Center, sir,” announced the caller. “A secure transmission has come in and you’re going to want to hear it.”
“Bring it in.”
“Yes, sir.”
The voice on the computer file was Kyra Stryker’s. The young woman, wherever she was, had set up a sat phone, recorded the message on her smartphone, then compressed and encrypted it, and transmitted it in a single upload that likely took less than a minute. The Russians would never have been able to track it. They would have been doing well just to detect it.
“I have reason to believe that all assets in this AOR have been compromised. Whether they have been captured is unknown, but I can confirm that my three priority assets have been neutralized,” she said. Barron listened, pen in hand, but he knew that he would be writing nothing down until he’d listened to the transmission at least twice. “Also, I have no safe way to communicate with any who might have evaded capture. My hosts demonstrated during my last attempt that they knew the details of the assets’ communications plan, so we must assume that all communications methods are compromised. I also must assume that all meeting and dead-drop sites are known. To my knowledge, my safe house is still secure but that may not last indefinitely. I would appreciate any information HQ could provide on that.”
Barron closed his eyes. He’d expected this when the first news of Maines’s treason had reached him, but hearing that the Agency’s Moscow networks had been decimated was one of those pieces of news that no mental preparation could soften. After Lavrov had finished rounding up their assets, he would almost certainly turn his attention to the Agency’s safe houses and other facilities. His people would have to start from zero to rebuild everything, and they would need decades to do it.
“… Also, the host country knows my identity. Our former friend appears to have burned me to his new friends. However, I have reason to suspect that our officer believed KIA last week is alive and in host country’s custody,” Kyra reported. Barron’s eyes opened wide at that announcement. “I have no information on his condition or location, but host-country security services has offered to return him in exchange for my agreement to become their asset. I refused.”
“Good girl,” Barron muttered, nodding. Kyra could have agreed, trying to lure the Russians into a double-agent operation, but that was an exceptionally dangerous game and Lavrov would have prepared for it. Barron suspected that Lavrov’s offer never had been genuine at all, but a baited hook to get Kyra to come in from the field. For what reason, Barron wasn’t sure. He was sure that any answer would have come at a high and ugly cost that Kyra would have been made to pay.
No assets to save, no way to communicate with anyone who might be free, no safe houses, Barron reasoned. No resources. Maines had burned the Agency’s operations to the ground in Moscow. It’s time to come home, Stryker, Barron decided. There was nothing else for her to do. The question now was how to get her out—
“I have an operational plan that I want to propose,” Kyra announced. Barron’s head jerked toward the laptop playing the file. “I am uncertain about chances for success, but at this point, I see no other options. We will need time to reestablish operations in this AOR and creating confusion might be the best we can hope for. Accordingly, I propose that the following…”
Barron put pen to paper and began to scribble notes as the woman spoke to him from the Russian countryside. Kyra finished talking and the recording went silent. He played it again and reviewed his notes as she talked, making sure he had missed nothing. When she finished for the second time, he read everything over and sat back in his chair.
You devious woman, Barron thought. Kyra’s admission that she was “uncertain” whether it would work was an understatement… he wasn’t even sure what would constitute success or whether he could properly call it covert action. Stryker had been brave even to propose it, but he knew from his own experience that an officer trapped in a hostile country viewed risk and reward very differently from those sitting behind desks in northern Virginia.
And I really am one of those now, aren’t I? he thought. He’d spent most of his own career in the field, and had so often despised those above him, the former case officers who’d gotten so comfortable in the chairs they’d really been chasing all along… the ones who liked to claim “I’m one of you, I know what it’s like out there,” but who so clearly had forgotten, who’d never really wanted to be out there at all and whose eyes really had always been focused on a desk on the Agency’s seventh floor.
Barron capped his pen. Not going to be one of those, he decided.
He walked out to the foyer that separated his office from that of the director of analysis twenty feet away. Barron looked down to his secretary. “Julie, I need you to get Kathy Cooke on the line. Whatever she’s doing, tell her office that she’ll want to cut it off and call me.” He paused. His assistant knew better than to ask why he needed to call the deputy director of national intelligence. But Cooke would want to know. “Tell her it’s about Jon.”
The secretary had no idea who Jon was, but answered “yes, sir” anyway and reached for her own phone. Barron returned to his office, closed the door, and waited the hour it took for the deputy DNI to free herself and return his call.