She’d worried about building an ignitor until she realized that Lavrov’s men would provide that for her when they came.
Barron wouldn’t be happy with what she was about to do, she was sure, but if Lavrov’s men were coming, then the safe house was lost to the Agency anyway. Its only useful purpose now would be to send a message to the general that neither Kyra nor the Agency intended to go out so quietly.
Kyra fetched a large metal pot from its home under the counter and turned on the stove. She uncapped the first bottle of bleach and began to pour it into the pot.
“Your report, Colonel?” Lavrov leaned back in his chair, using his shoulder to hold the phone to his ear. Russian breweries had not mastered the art of the twist cap and opening a bottle took both of his hands.
“We have completed raids on four of the homes that your source identified,” Sokolov said. “All were abandoned, all sanitized. If they truly were CIA safe houses, the evidence of it was thoroughly removed before the custodians left. Impressive, given how little time they must have had.”
“Indeed,” Lavrov said. “It does not matter, Colonel. I expect they will all be abandoned and stripped except one, and it is that one you must find.” The bottle top finally came loose and the general took his first taste. The brew inside was bitter and not quite as cold as he liked it.
“There are six more on the list you gave me, General,” Sokolov advised. “It takes several hours to plan and conduct a proper raid on each one to make sure no one evades capture. It will take at least another day, possibly two to target them all.”
“Understood. No delays, Colonel.”
“Yes, sir,” Sokolov said.
Kyra set the plastic bucket down and peeled the latex gloves off her hands. The napalm was plastered in every major room of the house. Running the improvised string fuse to each incendiary site was going to take another half hour. Setting up the front, mudroom, and back doors to ignite the entire system would take less than a minute.
An hour later and the job done, Kyra looked to the clock. She still had twelve hours before she had to go out on the street.
The coffee had long since stopped doing its job and Kyra wanted to stumble back up the stairs to the bedroom. She would need some sleep and then some food in her stomach for what came next. But it was not safe to stay, as tempting as the soft bed was. Kyra might easily wake up to find the Spetsnaz standing over her, or, more likely, the house burning around her if the ignition system worked as she’d planned.
She could sleep in the Tiguan after she’d found some hidden field miles from here. Her last chore here was to turn on the shortwave transmitter, tuned to the frequency she’d used to talk to Lavrov last night, and leave it on. Then she would drive out. The Spetsnaz would come—
A telephone rang.
Her mind hazy from lack of sleep, she needed several seconds to realize that it wasn’t any ringtone on her cell. No, it was the house phone. Headquarters? she thought. Langley surely had the number, but Barron wouldn’t be so stupid as to call her on an open, unencrypted line.
She stumbled off in search of a handset, finally finding one on the sixth or seventh ring, having lost count. The caller ID showed nothing.
Answer it? she wondered.
Why not? Jon’s voice in her mind said. You’re heading out the door anyway and not coming back.
She picked it up, then froze in place, realizing too late that she didn’t know how to answer a call in Russian or whether there was any kind of security phrase assigned to this location.
The caller saved her the embarrassment. “You are American?” the man asked. His voice was disguised, digitized somehow.
Kyra said nothing. “You must leave house if you are American,” the voice said, the man’s English accented and broken. “They are coming to your safe site. You have maybe one hour, maybe more, but they come and they arrest you. You must leave now.”
She heard a click on the other end, then a dial tone, and she stared at the phone in her hand. Kyra set it back in the cradle.
It had not been some mistaken caller dialing the wrong number. The man had expected that an American would answer, which meant he’d known that he was calling a safe house. That, together with the fact that he had been able to get the telephone number, which was unlisted, yelled that the caller was someone who had access to official information.
But he’d spoken quickly, not waiting for a response from her, but simply had spilled what he knew and cut the call. Worried that someone might hear him? she wondered. Then she understood. The caller hadn’t merely been someone with access to official information. No, counterintelligence information.
There was a mole in Lavrov’s operation. Someone knew about Lavrov’s operations against the Agency.
Someone Maines didn’t give up? Someone he didn’t know about? she wondered. Or maybe just someone Lavrov hadn’t arrested yet, but that seemed unlikely. If there was anyone in a position to know about his counterintelligence operation, Lavrov would have been a fool not to neutralize that traitor first. No, there was someone in the Kremlin, maybe the GRU, who was moving against Lavrov and who wasn’t on whatever list Maines had given up.
Kyra checked the caller ID again and cursed the empty display. The caller might have been someone who could help her find out what had happened to Jon. The ID might have given her somewhere to start, some bit of information she could have used to reconnect with the Russian caller, whoever he was.
The quiet of the house seemed hostile to her now, the shadows of the hallway oppressive. Maybe one hour, she repeated in her mind.
The adrenaline surge cleared her mind and her vision. She ran across the hallway to the equipment room, threw the door open, grabbed for the satellite phone, and began stabbing at the keypad. The call connected, encrypted, and she heard an American accent for the first time in days.
“Operator.”
“This is site GRANITE,” Kyra announced. “I have reason to believe this location will be raided within the hour. All remaining equipment and papers will be sanitized and I am evacuating.”
“Roger, copy that,” the male voice on the other end said. “To which other site will you evac?”
Kyra sucked in a deep breath. “None of them. All sites in this area have been compromised.”
The man on the other end was professional enough to keep his thoughts to himself about that. “Copy that, all sites in your immediate area compromised. Are you requesting evac from the country?”
“Negative. I’m heading for the embassy.”
“Copy that, good luck and stay safe.” The operator disconnected the call.
Kyra pulled the crypto card from the phone and stuffed it in her pocket. Breaking down the sat phone and its antenna took her less than a minute. That job done, she sat down in front of the classified computer and launched the program that would wipe the hard drive. The machine made her confirm twice that she really wanted the program to execute. She told it yes both times and the machine obediently began to overwrite every file on the system.
The file-deletion utility reported that it needed ten minutes to chew up all of the encrypted data on the hard drive.
Ten minutes. It had been almost forty-five minutes since the anonymous Russian had called. She looked out the windows toward the main road, saw nothing. Kyra pulled the chair to the window, sat down, and stared out, waiting for the enemy to come. The watch on her wrist showed the seconds passing by more slowly than she had ever thought possible.