The Fall of Moscow Station (11 page)

Maines frowned. “What do you mean?”

“She's wearing a red jacket. I believe that was the signal she was to give you if your country accepted the proposal made to her,” Lavrov said, as though a child should have understood his meaning.

Maines understood it perfectly well, and his eyes widened. Lavrov saw it. “Of course, we heard everything. Surely you knew that?” the Russian asked, his question entirely rhetorical. Whether Maines had thought of the possibility or not was moot now. “I would like to hear the story about how you saved her from a safe house in Caracas, but at this moment I have an operation that is waiting for your information to proceed. So please don't lie to me again about whether you know her name.”

“You want to know what I know? The president of the United States just agreed to pay me fifty million dollars not to tell you jack, including her name,” Maines said, pointing toward the street at Kyra. “So if you want me to talk, that's the bid to beat.”

Lavrov frowned. “Such obstinance. But I will counter the offer. I will give you my bid . . . eight hundred rubles.”

“Eight hundred rubles?” He did the math in his head.
Twelve dollars?

Lavrov raised a hand and motioned with two fingers. Three younger men, all muscular, entered the room, one carrying a small bag. Two of them took Maines by the arms and forced him to the table, ignoring his curses and protests. The American struggled, but he was in no shape to hold his own against either of the men, much less both together. They forced his arms out, putting his hands palm down on the brown oak.

Lavrov pulled out the chair on the other side of the table and sat down, looking Maines in the eyes. “Yes, eight hundred rubles . . . the price in Moscow for a good Russian-made hammer.” Lavrov nodded to the man carrying the bag. The younger Russian opened the satchel and pulled out a small club mallet.

“No! You can't—” Maines started. Without hesitation, the Russian swung the small metal sledge and slammed it down on Maines's outstretched hand.

Maines screamed as the hammer shattered his metacarpal bones into fragments. On reflex, he tried to rip his crippled hand away from the two men holding him down, but they had expected him to fight and kept him pinned. The hammer slammed down again, this time just behind where the first blow had landed, and the
crunch
of grinding carpals in his wrist was heard for a brief second before Maines's howl of agony drowned it out.

“She will not be disappointed when you don't come out to meet her . . . more angry, I think,” Lavrov told him. “So she will go back to her embassy and report to her superiors that you refused the deal, which I suspect will not be extended a second time. They will believe that you never intended to accept any deal, and perhaps will think that you were only buying time to let us act on your information. You were clever to try to build a bridge home after I burned your ships back. But now I am burning your bridge too.” He nodded to the Russian holding the tool and the man swung it down without hesitation.

Five more strikes with the hammer made sure there were no more unbroken bones in Maines's right hand. The two assistants at his sides let him go and Maines hardly moved. He tried to lift his arm and moaned in pain as the agony of bits of bone grinding into his muscles and skin sent new spasms of agony cutting through his brain. He whimpered, trying not to cry, only just succeeding, and he squeezed his right arm at the wrist as though he could bottle the pain up in his hand and keep it from passing through the nerves up into his mind.

Lavrov stared at the pathetic sight. “Now, Mr. Maines, you have lied to me, but I must confess that I also lied to you. You must forgive me for that. My time is not unlimited, as I suggested, and your grace period is gone. You have information that I need and you will give it to me now. There is morphine in the infirmary waiting for you, but you don't know where that is, do you? These men will be happy to show you the way after I am satisfied. But for every minute you make me wait to begin from this moment, you will get the hammer. We will save your spine for last if you are still intransigent, but I think you will not let matters go so far.”

Lavrov took a small notebook out of his jacket pocket, then a Montblanc pen. He opened the notebook and laid it on the table, then uncapped the pen and laid it on the first blank page. He looked at his watch and marked the time. “Now, Mr. Maines, shall we talk? First, I want the name of the young woman outside on the street. Second, I want the names of all of the CIA officers currently stationed in Moscow. And third, I want you to tell me everything you know about this CIA unit you call the Red Cell.”

•  •  •

Kyra's own watch confirmed that she'd waited an hour and a half on the bench, more than fifteen minutes after Maines's deadline.
He's not coming
, she concluded. Why not?
Did he know there really was no deal?
That was unlikely, she thought. There were only five people who even knew about the traitor's proposal, including the president and Maines himself, and she refused to believe that either Jon or Barron was a turncoats himself.
The Russians found a way to tap our secure phones?
That thought was almost more upsetting than the first, and the notion seemed just as unlikely.

Maybe he's dead.
That would be more good fortune than she could expect, and she couldn't assume the possibility anyway, given the price to her country if she was wrong.

Was he trying to buy time for the GRU to move on our assets?
A deception operation would explain why the old Russian had been so willing to let her see Maines the day before. And if Maines had cooperated with it, then the man's treason had gone beyond simply giving up names to the enemy.

Kyra started walking west and pulled an encrypted cell phone from her pocket and dialed a preprogrammed number. The call took thirty seconds to connect and encrypt.

“Barron.”

“It's me,” Kyra announced. “He didn't show.”

“That wasn't unexpected, but good try,” Barron said. “I doubt his new friends would let him walk out the front door even if he wanted to.”

“Probably not,” Kyra agreed. “I'm headed back to the embassy. You should thank our friends here for being ready to help. I'm sorry they came out for nothing.”

“They'll understand.” The call disconnected, Kyra replaced the phone in her coat and started the short walk to the west.

U.S. Embassy

Berlin, Germany

Barron cradled the phone. “Well, that's that, I guess. Maines didn't come out.”

“Nothing is ever so easy,” Jon mused.

“No, but sometimes the universe smiles.” Barron hunched over the table, his weight on his fists, his head down, thinking. He looked up at the analyst. “I guess the question now is what Lavrov is doing? You said we might be able to save some assets if we figured that out, but I don't know where to even start with that.”

“I think the starting point is obvious,” Jon told the NCS director.

Barron furrowed his brow. “You and I have very different definitions of ‘obvious.' ”

“Strelnikov was killed three days ago, and Maines showed up the day after,” Jon observed. “They could have taken off for Moscow anytime after that. So why is Lavrov still
here
?”

“You think he came to Berlin for another reason?”

“All of his obvious reasons for being here are finished,” Jon noted. “Maybe Lavrov lured both Strelnikov and Maines to Berlin because he was already going to be here.”

“Good thought, but where do we start with that?”

“You're a case officer,” Jon said. “And you were the station chief in Moscow once upon a time. So why did you ever travel outside of Russia?”

“Right now I came here to meet with the Germans to confirm Strelnikov's death,” Barron replied. “But that's a weird case. Usually I traveled foreign to meet an asset someplace the Russians wouldn't be watching.”

“So let's assume that Strelnikov was here to meet someone. Any candidates?” Jon asked.

Barron pondered the question. “When I first met with the Bundeskriminalamt about Strelnikov, we talked suspects. They did say that a Syrian army officer managed to evade surveillance on a drive north of the city. That would've been a day or so before they found Strelnikov's body floating in the lake, and the day after Lavrov came to town. But they found the Syrian coming back into Berlin along the same road later in the day.”

“How long was he gone?”

“Less than four hours,” Barron said.

“All right, let's assume Lavrov was meeting with the Syrian somewhere up north,” Jon said. “Assuming they talked for at least an hour, that would mean their meeting site would be within a ninety-minute drive of Berlin.”

“That's still a big search area.”

“Yes, it is,” Jon conceded. “I don't suppose the Germans were following Lavrov.”

“The chairman of the GRU? Yeah, they'd follow him anywhere and everywhere. But a guy like that could find a way out of the Russian Embassy without being seen if he really wanted to.”

Jon nodded. “The only other angle we can work is Strelnikov's murder itself. The Germans didn't find any forensic evidence that could identify where he was killed?”

“They didn't mention anything,” Barron replied. “Between the rain that week and the body being in the lake for a few days, anything useful probably got washed away, but I'll check with them again.”

“Ask about anything unusual, no matter how minor,” Jon suggested.

“Will do.”

•  •  •

Barron took three hours to respond. “The Germans have nothing,” he told Jon, the man's voice slightly broken up by interference on the cellular network. “It was a straight-up drowning. Toxicology was clean and no signs of defensive wounds or bruises on him. Assuming he really didn't drown going for a swim, whoever took him out was a professional.”

Jon frowned. “There must be something to grab on to.”

“Afraid not,” Barron said. “The only unusual thing about Strelnikov's death was that his was the second body they'd pulled out of the Müggelsee in a month.”

“Do tell,” Jon said, interest in his voice.

“Late August, the local police pulled a guy out of the water on the other side of the lake, British kid. I've got the name . . . hang on . . .” Jon heard the rustling pages of a notebook over the receiver. “Graham Longstreet.”

Jon scribbled the name on an index card and handed it to Kyra. She read the name, leaned over a laptop, and began typing. “Okay. That's it?”

“Yeah, that's it,” Barron said. “On my way back.”

The call ended and Jon hung up. “You think the Russians took out this British kid too?” Kyra asked.

Jon shrugged. “Could be a coincidence,” he admitted. “Got anything?”

“The obituary,” Kyra said. She pulled up the web page detailing the young man's demise and scanned the report. “It says he drowned, names the usual surviving family, loved hiking and environmental causes.”

“He loved hiking,” Jon said, his voice quiet. “Did he have a web page? A blog? Facebook or Instagram accounts?”

Kyra clicked the computer's mouse a few times. “Yeah, a web page . . . looks like he was one of those guys who likes exploring abandoned sites. He's got pictures here from the Six Flags park in New Orleans, the one that got wiped out by Hurricane Katrina a decade ago. Here's some from Pripyat, Ukraine. That was a whole city that got abandoned after Chernobyl in '86. I would've run from that one, too. There's a bunch of others here . . . Willard Asylum in New York, Canfranc Rail Station in Spain, Château Miranda in Belgium.” Kyra scrolled through the online album, disbelieving. “I guess everyone needs a hobby, but this is morbid. These places look like sets for horror movies.”

Jon leaned in over her shoulder. “Any abandoned sites like that in Germany on his list?”

Kyra scanned through the entire list. “None that he visited.” She looked up at her mentor. “Maybe he was here to correct that little problem.”

Jon smiled at her. “Search it.”

Kyra turned back to the keyboard and began typing.

ABANDONED SITES GERMANY

The search results appeared and Kyra scrolled through the list. “Amazing how many places just get left to rot,” she said, awe in her voice. “Half of these sites were built by the Russians during the Cold War and then abandoned after the Wall fell in '89.”

“Any within an hour's drive north of Berlin?” Jon asked.

Kyra needed five minutes to find the answer. “Vogelsang Soviet Military Base. It's enormous. They housed fifteen thousand men and their families there, and somehow the Agency and every other Western intel agency missed it for years. Looks like the kind of place where an abandoned-site junkie would have on his bucket list.”

“And every other sane person on the planet would want to avoid,” Jon said. “A hundred dollars says that Lavrov was assigned to Vogelsang at some point when he was younger.”

“I'm not a GS-14 like you, so I don't get paid enough to gamble,” Kyra replied. “So Longstreet goes to Vogelsang a month ago, stumbles across Lavrov or his people, and they kill him to protect whatever they're doing. They dump the body in the Müggelsee, which is a good two hours away, so nobody comes looking for him around the base,” she offered. “Then, a month later, Strelnikov gets lured out there, and they follow the same procedure.”

“Not a bad theory,” Jon agreed. “It's pretty thin on the evidence.”

“We know how to fix that, don't we?” Kyra asked.

The Oval Office

The White House

Washington, D.C.

Daniel Rostow had been in this office less than three years, but his youth already was paying the price for his ambition. The end of his first term was still little more than a year out and the man's brown hair already was streaked through with white. The dark circles under the eyes disappeared only when a makeup artist covered them up before he went before cameras or Congress, and his frame had thinned since his inauguration despite the personal chef and Navy stewards at his disposal. Barron had heard rumors that the doctors were worried about his weight loss and confirmations that Rostow hadn't seen the inside of the White House gym in over a year. The presidency offered no true downtime, no matter how often the occupant went to Camp David or the putting green or the movie theater in the White House. Aides came and went with tidbits and papers to be signed with no regard for personal time, phone calls had to be taken when they came. Rostow's schedule was parsed in five-minute increments, with thirty-second meetings scheduled for the times he would be walking from one room to another.