The German Federal Criminal Investigation Office reported today that its officers recovered a drowning victim from the Großer Müggelsee Lake southeast of Berlin. Forensic investigators have identified the victim as retired lieutenant general Stepan Illarionovich Strelnikov, director of Russia’s Foundation for Advanced Research…
The secure phone rang, interrupting her reading. She knew who was calling and what the subject of conversation would be. She’d told her secretary to block every other call from anyone who ranked lower than herself, which was almost everyone in the intelligence community now. She picked up the handset. “How’s Berlin?” she asked without preamble.
“Depressing.” Clark Barron’s voice was deep, the resonance masked by the digital encryption, but the man’s somber tone came across the line perfectly clear. The CIA director of the National Clandestine Service was an unhappy man at the moment. “I’ve got a cable coming your way with the details, but I wanted to give you an informal report first,” he said. “The Bundesnachrichtendienst let me see the body and their forensic evidence. It’s Strelnikov, no question. Coroner says he drowned.” The Bundesnachrichtendienst was Germany’s foreign intelligence service.
“He drowned?” Cooke asked, incredulous. “How does a former Spetsnaz officer drown?” The question was entirely rhetorical.
Barron answered it anyway. “By having someone hold his head under,” he offered. “I think Maines gave him up, but this isn’t the way the Russians do business. They keep suspects stuck in the homeland while they build airtight cases, and then they nail them. They don’t send them abroad to execute them, and they sure don’t move this fast. Doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“Yeah,” Cooke acknowledged. She stared out his window, then shut her eyes tight, wishing the reality away. One of the CIA’s most important assets was dead. The only question now was how the Russians had found him out, and the most likely answer promised more disasters to come.
Cooke shunted her emotions aside and set herself to the business. “Clark, I’m going to send Jon and Kyra out to you. They’re good at pulling things like this apart.”
“Yeah, they are,” Barron confirmed. “How fast can you get them out here?”
“I’ll have them on a plane to Berlin by tonight.”
Cooke couldn’t see the NCS director nod his head on the other side of the Atlantic. “I’ll pick them up. One question… do they have a blank check to follow this thing into Moscow?”
“If that’s where the trail leads. Your discretion,” Cooke said. “One more thing, Clark?”
“Yeah, boss?”
“If you get a chance to bring Maines home, you don’t need to be gentle with him on my account.”
“Understood,” Barron replied. “He’ll come home breathing and mentally undamaged. He’ll have to consider anything else a bonus.”
“Roger that,” Cooke said. “Good hunting.” She didn’t wait for her subordinate to hang up the phone before doing it herself. She swiveled her chair around to face her computer and checked the in-box. Barron’s promised cable hadn’t arrived yet. The DNI was waiting for his own briefing and she wasn’t going to deliver it until she had the official report in hand. She was tempted to call over to CIA’s operations center to ask about it, but decided to wait. No doubt Barron had marked up the electronic report with all of the code words and crypts that would send it screaming through the system to his in-box as fast as the system would allow. It would be on her screen within the hour, barring inattention of incompetence of the ops center staff, and, if not, the thrashing they would receive wouldn’t be dished out over the phone.
Cooke exhaled in frustration, checked her watch, and the waiting started again.
The morning fog covered the German fields in gray smoke, hiding the fields until the plane was nearly on the ground. Kyra Stryker couldn’t see the sun or sky once the aircraft was on the tarmac, which was slick from a storm that had passed through during the night. Silver puddles were scattered across the blacktop, spraying in all directions as planes and support trucks drove through them.
She had not expected to visit Germany during her career, certainly not during her first ten years anyway. European assignments were so often reserved for senior officers who had served their time in less desirable posts and had the personal connections on Langley’s Seventh Floor to lock up the positions they wanted. Getting the truly prized assignments required both a track record and inside help. Kyra knew she could and would be good at it, but three years’ working in the Red Cell had left her wondering whether she wanted to try.
Kyra exhaled hard. The man next to her looked at her sideways. “Nervous?” Jonathan Burke, the chief of the Red Cell didn’t turn his head to confirm the guess. Jon wore his usual khakis and an oxford shirt, no tie or jacket. He kept both on a hanger behind his office door but she’d never seen him wear them. Only God and the White House get a coat and tie, he’d once said, and she’d never seen the middle-aged man break that rule for anyone else. Few noticed. He avoided people as much as they allowed.
“About the mission? No,” Kyra said after a moment’s thought, surprising herself. “After you’ve been shot at, not much else gets the blood pressure up. It’s hard to care about what people think after someone’s made a serious effort to kill you. But it does get really hard to put up with stupidity.”
“And now you see why people consider me prickly,” Jon said.
“They’re not wrong,” she teased.
Both customs and the luggage handlers lived up to the myth of German efficiency, and the analysts were in the city within the hour. Berlin fascinated Kyra as it passed by in the window. She’d seen so many cities that had sacrificed their character for modern amenities, but Berlin had retained a look of old history. There were few true skyscrapers jutting above the stone buildings and rounded domes that looked centuries old. It was impressive, she thought, given how much of skyline had been bombed into wreckage by the Allies during the Second World War and how much had been rebuilt while the city served as the front line of the Cold War. These Germans had survived hell itself for decades and Berlin was now the testament to their endurance.
The hotel was a decent choice, and Kyra had breakfast brought up to her room. She rarely slept on planes and the pilot stubbornly had plowed through a series of Atlantic storms, robbing her of what little rest she might have enjoyed. Jon was always telling her not to substitute caffeine for sleep, but time was a zero-sum game in counterintelligence, always working for the hunter or the prey, but never both. Kyra didn’t want to give Alden Maines or the Russians more time. German coffee and energy drinks would solve the jet-lag problem for one day at the cost of shaky hands, but she would manage it.
The U.S. Embassy was close, eight blocks away on foot. The Marine guards ran their IDs and let them pass. Like them, Clark Barron was a visitor with no office in the building of his own. It took some time to find the man and an unused classified space where they could talk.
The conference room was government standard except for the high-backed leather chairs that surrounded the table. The windows gave a view to the north and a small curio case of foreign gifts sat in one of the opposite corners. Relief maps of every continent but their own hung on the walls.
“Good to see you both again. It’s been a while since Pioneer and the Farm,” the NCS director said.