She did have one advantage. The Russian experience gained practicing counterintelligence on their own territory was predicated on the idea that both sides shared the same ideas about success and failure, the same definitions. Kyra hated that anyone ever called it a game, but the contest did have its own rules about how to win and lose. The Russians always assumed that the Americans would send their best people and use their best tradecraft, that they would never make an unforced error. The Americans usually assumed that the Russians had enough manpower and practice that they could be everywhere and see everything, omniscient enough that they could make an unforced error and still recover. They didn’t have to be perfect to win here.
Kyra couldn’t win the old game, but she might be able to win her own game, where a different set of rules decreed that a lack of skill on the street was a tactic, not a weakness.
Kyra’s advantage was that she was both a case officer and an analyst. Jon believed that she would be a better analyst than he one day, or so Marisa Mills had told her before she’d been killed the year before… someone with a foot in both worlds who could fuse the two. She brought practical experience into Jon’s theoretical world. Now, she thought, they might turn the world on its head by doing the reverse.
Why do you always run straight in? Jon’s voice had asked her. She’d found the answer. She had always been thinking like a case officer, always moving, always trying to take the initiative by moving. Now it was time to think like an analyst.
Jon had spent years teaching her where analysts’ mind-sets and biases had led them wrong, where their long experience with one subject had carried them to exactly the wrong analytical conclusion. The Russian mind was no different, she was certain. She could win if she could bring them to a place where their experience dictated exactly the wrong move.
Kyra had left Ettleman’s apartment and abandoned the Tiguan two hours and three miles ago. Most of the equipment it had carried was at the bottom of the Moskva River, including the satellite phone. She’d thought about leaving it all with the State officer, but she had decided against giving the man anything incriminating. The Russians would be in his apartment eventually and she didn’t want to cause him trouble. She didn’t need any of the equipment now. Either the operation would work or it would not. None of the gear she’d carried would make the difference, so she’d laid it to rest at the river’s bottom.
She marched north up the Smolenskaya highway. The Moskva was to her left. Three years ago, she’d been walking by a river like this one in downtown Caracas, the Guaire, a concrete channel that became an artificial river that split the Venezuelan city in half during the rainy season. She’d been shot during that operation. Maines had brought her home. Now the world seemed to be working in reverse. She was out to bring him home, even if he didn’t want to come.
The Moskva turned away from her to the northwest. She’d passed the British Embassy on her right a few minutes before and her own country’s diplomatic outpost was not far ahead. Kyra didn’t know how far out the FSB or the GRU surveillance cordon would reach from that point, but Lavrov would surely have had both embassies under watch. She’d started looking for surveillance a mile before approaching the British compound and had seen nothing, but that was meaningless. The Russians could throw a hundred men and women at her and she would never see the same face twice.
Kyra had come wearing a light disguise, baggy clothes, glasses, a wig, and a hoodie. Some of it she’d scrounged from Ettleman, the rest from stores around his apartment. It wasn’t a very good disguise and therefore it was good enough.
Lavrov would have found a picture of her, from the cameras in customs at the Domodedovo Airport or the embassy in Berlin. His people would have scanned it in, then created a hundred variations on her face, different hair colors and styles, with glasses and without, cheeks fatter or sunken in. He would have distributed them to whichever teams were watching these streets.
They would see a young woman approach. They would sort through the pictures and find one that wasn’t far off her current appearance. Is it her? they would wonder. A small team would start to follow behind. She was walking toward the U.S. Embassy. Was that her destination? Would she turn off?
Are you behind me? she asked the Russians. Did you pick me when I walked past the British Embassy? She was going to be very disappointed if they hadn’t, but they would start to follow her eventually.
She stopped under the overpass where the Kutuzovsky Avenue crossed the Moskva and the Smolenskaya highway. She didn’t bother looking behind. If the Russians weren’t there, she would give them more opportunities to find her. If they were there, so much the better.
Kyra made a show of fumbling with the satchel she was carrying over her right shoulder, then took her time pulling out the fur ushanka hat that she’d kept inside and put it on her head. It was an innocent act, one that thousands of people might do on a cool fall night like this one… or it might be an attempt to change appearance. Security officers were a paranoid lot and Kyra was giving them just enough to keep their attention.
She turned east and walked alongside Kutuzovsky Avenue. Cars roared past on the roadway above. The U.S. Embassy was only a block north but she was going to take the long way around. She looked up at the sky. It was night and she wished she could see the stars. They were all washed out of the sky by the city lights and smog. She kept walking, one block east, the cool air brushing over her face.
She slid the satchel off, then removed her coat and felt the cold air invade her shirt. The coat was reversible, gray on the inside, brown on the outside. She turned it inside out, then put it back on. She practiced the maneuver a thousand times and she had to work now to mess it up.
Kyra reached the intersection and crossed north along the Novinsky road. She walked another block, not bothering to look behind for anyone following.
One block and she turned west, doubling back the way she’d originally come. Come on, she thought. You have to have figured it out by now. You can’t be that dense.
She was still free and approaching the corner. The embassy was a half block to the north. One more to be sure.
There was a Dumpster jutting slightly out of an alley ahead to her right. Kyra gently idled toward it. Within arms’ reach, she reached up and pulled the ushanka hat and the dark wig off her head and dropped them in, a movement that took less than a second. She pulled the jacket’s hood over her hair, and turned right onto the Smolenskaya again.
Kyra heard the van pull up behind her, the side doors opening before it came to a stop.
There we go, she thought. Not looking back, she pushed off and ran.
Four men dismounted on the move. A series of parked cars kept the van away from the sidewalk, giving her six feet to spare from the men spilling out of the vehicle. The first one tried to hurdle one of the cars, caught his foot on the bumper, and went down. Kyra angled away from the street as she picked up speed. The second man made it between the cars, but he overreached trying to lay hands on her and lost his balance stumbling forward and went down on the asphalt. The third man behind hurdled his teammate, but Kyra was accelerating now. She was pulling away. She heard the van speed up and the woman pushed herself, now sprinting as fast as she could go.
The embassy gate was fifty yards ahead. A series of white concrete planter boxes, really barricades, formed a low wall to her left, the parked cars still blocking off the road to her right. She heard the footsteps behind her getting close. Even at her best speed, the men were going to run her down.