The Dead Drop (24 page)

“Well,” said Janet, sticking a straw into her Slim-Fast, “I’ll be seeing you both soon.”

“You will?”

“You know. Spy Camp training this morning?” Janet raised an eyebrow pointedly as if to say,
Don’t you even know what’s going on with your campers? How do you function in the world?

“Oh—right.” Gilda suddenly remembered that Janet was going to play the role of an enemy agent in a Spy Camp activity.
She’ll probably do a good job in that role,
Gilda thought.

Gilda and Agent Moscow left the office to head back to the Venona Room.

On Gilda’s desk, the computer screen displayed the poem “Song of the Last Meeting.” Neither Matthew nor Janet noticed the face that appeared—the eerie eyes that gazed into the room through the words of the poem.

30

This woman may look like someone’s grandmother, but she’s actually very dangerous.” Gilda stood in front of her spy recruits displaying a photograph of Janet disguised with makeup and a brown wig. “Her code name is Ms. Frumpus and she’s suspected of selling top-secret intelligence to terrorists and unfriendly foreign governments. Your assignment is to find her, trail her, and capture her on film. In other words, take her picture. But here’s the catch: you need to take her picture before she even notices you looking at her. And I’m going to show you how to do that part in a minute.

“Now, if you find Ms. Frumpus having a meeting or exchanging information with an enemy agent, we definitely want that on film. She might be in disguise, so look
very
carefully. I should also warn you that she’s known to have a rather surly disposition and she dislikes children, so watch out. Got it?”

Gilda’s team stared at the photo. The recruits nodded silently and Gilda felt satisfied that she had scared them into momentary silence.

“So if we find this Frumpus lady,” James Bond ventured, “what are we supposed to do with her?”

“Team Crypt, what did I just tell you to do?”

“I mean, shouldn’t we try to catch her and put her in handcuffs?”

“Yeah,” said The Misanthrope. “It sounds like we need to get her off the streets, not just take her picture.”

Gilda chuckled, imagining how surprised Janet would be if a group of kids suddenly wrestled her to the ground and placed her in handcuffs.

“For this mission, your job is just to get accurate
information
by snapping a secret photograph. The actual arrest will be left to Special Operations after you do your job.”

“Ooh, can I be in Special Operations?” Baby Boy pleaded.

“That’s another lesson. This time it’s photography.”

Gilda showed her team the spy gadgets they would use to take their secret pictures: sunglasses with a hidden video recording device, a Cold War-era buttonhole camera, a writing pen that concealed a camera, a tiny Minox camera, and a video camera disguised as a pack of chewing gum. April had hastily showed Gilda how to use each of the gadgets, but while she wasn’t completely confident in her own technical skills, her team didn’t seem the least bit daunted by the devices.

“Now, who wants to try this secret buttonhole camera?”

“OH! OH! OH!!! ME! ME! ME!!!”

“Let me rephrase that question,” said Gilda, holding the buttonhole camera over several sets of outstretched hands. “Who feels sure that he or she can operate this correctly and successfully to capture a clear image of our target
and still stay undercover
?”

“ME! ME! ME!!!! I DO!!!”

Gilda distributed gadgets and watched her team examine them with a boisterous, clumsy curiosity that made her think of some young chimps she had once observed at the zoo.
I guess they’ll learn on the job,
she told herself.

31

The Interrogation

Wanting to lift her team’s spirits following the failure of their most recent mission, Gilda took her recruits down to the Spy City Café for lunch. Once inside the kitschy, modern restaurant decorated with photographs of real dead-drop locations and other historic spy landmarks in the city, the team turned its attention to ordering hot dogs with spy names like “Havana Dog” and “Red Square Dog.” Gilda noticed Boris Volkov and Jasper Clarke sitting together at a corner table, discussing something. Boris gestured broadly while taking large bites of a hamburger and scribbling notes on a napkin. Jasper Clarke appeared to be doing more listening than talking as he sipped a cup of coffee.

What were the two of them up to? Gilda suddenly wanted to approach their table: she had no idea what she was going to say, but this was a rare opportunity to try to get more information about Boris.
After all,
Gilda told herself,
he’s still a person of interest in connection with the dead drop in Oak Hill Cemetery. I need to check him out more thoroughly.

“Hi, there,” said Gilda, breaking up their conversation with what she hoped looked like a casually friendly impulse.

She immediately felt awkward; Jasper and Boris looked surprised and not very pleased that she had interrupted their discussion.

“It’s lovely Lady Gilda,” said Boris, tactfully.

“You know our new intern?” Jasper was obviously surprised, and, Gilda sensed, impressed that Boris already knew Gilda.

“Of course. Gilda assisted Mr. Morrow in acquiring the new artifacts.”

“Oh, I see,” said Jasper. “Wonderful additions to our collection.”

“There’s actually something I’ve been meaning to ask you about the artifacts, Mr. Volkov,” said Gilda, realizing she would have to get right to the point. “Your wife told me about the anomalies she experienced during the time you had the artifacts in your home.”

“Did she tiell you about the vodka she drank each time she saw these ‘anomalies’?” Boris winked at Jasper.

“Well, no—but I’m sure that by now you’ve both heard the rumors that the Spy Museum has been haunted ever since we acquired those two objects from Mr. Volkov.”

Boris burst into nervous laughter.

“Actually, I have heard no such rumors, Gilda,” said Jasper, frowning.

How can that be?
Gilda thought.
Aren’t intelligence officers supposed to know what’s going on all around them? But then, his office is so separate from all the gossip and intrigue; he’d have to set up a surveillance bug to get the scoop on what’s going on inside his own museum.

“Gilda, do you think this can wait for a later meeting? Boris and I are discussing some important plans for a new lecture series.”

Gilda knew she was pushing her luck, but she felt compelled to take a risk. She remembered the phrase from her cryptic dream:
You have to hurry.
“Just one more question, Mr. Volkov. Are you
sure
you can’t tell me who those objects belonged to back in Moscow? I know you acquired them from someone in the KGB years ago, but do you know
anything
at all about the person who owned them—or someone who might have used them in her work as a spy?”

Boris opened his hands in a gesture of equivocation. “It is hard to say what the truth is. During those years, everyone is lying to one another. But—I tiell you what I do know. First, a confession: technically, I stole the artifacts from the office of my boss in the KGB—a horrible man who made everyone around him miserable.” He raised a finger in the air as if to defend himself and emphasize his point. “But when I take these things I knew I was never going back to Moscow again; I thought I may need these things to prove who I am to the Americans—or maybe, who knows, to sell them if I need money. As far as who used them in spying activities? I don’t know. The rumor was that my boss used his girlfriends and maybe even his wife to hielp him conduct missions, secret assassinations, you name it. So maybe it was one of these women he used.”

Interesting,
Gilda thought.
So are we dealing with the ghost of Boris’s boss’s girlfriend or wife?
At the same time, Gilda felt frustrated that nothing in Boris’s story helped her answer her questions about the Anna Akhmatova poem or how any of this connected with the message she uncovered in the cemetery.

Boris glanced around the room nervously, as if worried that he had said too much—worried that some Russian spy in Washington might be trailing him with secret orders to punish him for his defection to the United States—his betrayal of his motherland.

Jasper Clarke also glanced around the room as he leaned back in his chair and dabbed his mouth in an artificial gesture of contented boredom.

As both men were looking away, Gilda seized an opportunity to get a more revealing profile of Boris: she swiped a table napkin upon which Boris had scribbled some notes. She wanted to find out whether there was any possibility that Boris had left the message she found in Oak Hill Cemetery, and she knew his handwriting would help her get to the bottom of that question.

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