The Fall of Moscow Station (23 page)

Lavrov laughed. “Truth wins the day eventually. Better to hear it early rather than late when there is little that can be done about it.”

The Russian sighed. “Yes, better not to delay.” Lavrov called out and an aide strode into the room. The general pulled out a notepad and scribbled a name on the paper, then tore it out and gave it to the functionary. “Contact Colonel Sokolov at the Aquarium and pass him this name. He is waiting for it. And please have the orderlies assist Mr. Maines back to his dormitory. He is not feeling well, and the sleep will do him some good.”

Utilisa Lermontov Road

Peredelkino, Moscow Oblast, Russia

The signal for a meeting was simple, a piece of tape on an iron fence post. If Topilin wanted the meeting, the tape would be vertical. If the CIA officer wanted the meeting, it would be horizontal. Finding the right street and the right post had taken Kyra half the day thanks to her inability to read Russian, but the GPS had finally led her to the spot. She'd come with a roll of tape in hand, but had been surprised to find two vertical stripes—Topilin's signal for an emergency. Kyra had returned to the safe house after that and pulled up his file on the classified computer, which had taken another hour. His file said that his next steps were to dispose of all incriminating evidence that the Agency had given him, then meet at an exfiltration point in the village of Vyborg, northeast of St. Petersburg near the Russian-Finnish border. His CIA handler would meet him there, where Topilin and his wife would hide in the trunk under a thermal blanket that would mask their body heat from sensors mounted at the border outposts. They would be given a mild sedative to calm their nerves, lest they panic from claustrophobia or some other terror, but that step wasn't in the actual file.

Vyborg was over five hundred miles from Moscow, a full day's drive by car. She prayed that Topilin hadn't left for the village yet. The GPS could lead her to Vyborg, but she doubted she would be able to find a man hiding there. She didn't even know Topilin's face. Even if she could find him, the round trip would take two days that she was sure she couldn't spare. Kyra needed to intercept Topilin before that or he would be beyond her reach as surely as if he'd been captured.

Where to destroy the evidence? Not at home, surely. Kyra knew Topilin's handler would have counseled against that. Burning plastics gave off an unmistakable smell that could raise suspicions. His file said that he had a dacha. That seemed more likely. It was southwest of the city and therefore somewhat out of his way if he was heading for Vyborg, but she didn't know enough about the man to know what other options he might have available to him.

Kyra parked a half mile away down a side road and ran through the woods, navigating her way using the map in her head that she had studied, instead of the GPS. The Russian fall was colder than she'd expected, and she felt a chill until she got up to speed, her own body heat warming her. The dacha appeared through the trees after ten minutes or so, a tidy little renovated barn by the looks of it, with a deck coming off the back. A late-model Ford was sitting in front of the house, her view of it partly blocked by one corner of the house. Kyra felt her spirits surge.
He's here—

A man appeared from behind the corner, grubby with oil-stained coveralls.
Topilin?
she wondered. That seemed unlikely. She supposed the mole might have dressed in the grubby clothes to keep the smoke and stains from burning evidence off his clothes, but something told her it wasn't so.

She shifted her position carefully to the right, trying to get a better view of the man through the underbrush. After moving a dozen feet, a second car came into view . . . a flatbed tow truck.

No.

The man in the coveralls needed ten minutes to get the Mondeo onto the truck bed and chain it down. He checked the restraints for tension, then mounted the cab, started the engine, and slowly made his way out toward the road, the trees finally taking him out of sight.

Kyra wanted to scream at the receding vehicle, at the driver, at anyone. If this was Topolin's dacha, if that was his car, then Topilin likely had been detained. She felt anger and depression mix inside her, certain that Topilin was a dead man. She prayed she was wrong, but she knew that she was not.

Kyra reset her clock and waited, shivering in the woods for another hour, searching for any other signs of life. The sun was low over the trees by the end of her self-imposed deadline, and she saw no lights in the house. She crept forward, leaned around the corner of the house, and saw no one.

The front door hung ajar. She moved closer and saw that the knob had been torn out.
No no no . . .
she screamed in her mind. She listened, heard no voices or movement inside. She opened the door gently, and stepped in.

The dacha interior was destroyed. There had been abandoned buildings in Vogelsang's decrepit state that had been in better condition. The walls had been torn open, the furniture gutted. The appliances in the kitchen were out of place, moved away from the walls so the intruders could search the spaces behind. A quick sweep of the house confirmed that every room had been dismantled in the same violent fashion.

There was a wood stove on the first floor in the front room. Kyra's family home had had one when she was young, a necessity living in the Virginia backwoods, where a snowstorm could cut off power and escape for days at a time. She'd spent many winter days keeping it fed with split oak logs on her father's orders. She could always get the fire inside raging, far hotter than any oven, a thousand degrees at the center when it was roaring. She loved the feeling of raw heat coming off the old cast-iron sides, which could linger for hours after the fire had burned down to coals.

Heat
, she thought. Kyra walked over to the wood stove. If Topilin had come to destroy evidence, he would have used the wood stove to do it.

She reached out slowly. There was no heat from the stove. She touched the cast iron, cold as the rocks outside. Kyra swung open the doors. The inside was covered with a thin layer of gray ash, whatever Topilin had been unable to scoop up after his last fire, which clearly had been some time ago.

Topilin hadn't been able to destroy his equipment.

Kyra could see how it had played out. The man had made it this far, but the Russian security services had been waiting for him. They'd taken him after he'd gotten out of his car but before he'd been able to carry anything inside the house.

She left the dacha, walked outside, and looked at the ground where the car had been. It was dark now, and she pulled out her flashlight, turned it on, and swept the ground. There were footprints in the dust left by the sparse gravel, made by different soles and shoe sizes. Kyra couldn't tell how many men had been here, but it had been several. Then two long lines where the gravel had been knocked aside. She stared at them, confused, then realized they'd been made by a man's shoes as he was dragged along the ground.

Adolf Viktorovich Topilin was a dead man walking somewhere inside Lubyanka Prison, she was sure. Kyra turned off her flashlight and cursed Maines and Lavrov, and any Russian who'd had a hand in Topilin's arrest.

Should've gone for Puchkov first
, she thought. The major would've been the better choice. Kyra had been trying to be professional, go for the man who could confirm the existence of the EMP instead of the asset with the broader access to information. Puchkov might have been able to give her a clue to the locations of both Jon and the EMP.

No time for that
, a voice in her head chided her.
Topilin is gone. He's a dead man. Two moles left. You have to move.

Kyra turned back and jogged into the woods, running for her car. Moscow was an hour to the northeast, and she had to get back to the safe house. She needed to be ready to move at sunrise.

The White House

The Russian ambassador to the United States had not expected to be summoned to the White House again so quickly. He had thought President Rostow would have licked his wounds for at least a week as he consulted with his advisers on how best to respond to the Kremlin's expulsion of so many American spies from Moscow's streets. It had been an unprecedented act, but the act of a great power, Galushka thought. Rostow had hidden his reaction to the news reasonably well, but Galushka had read the man's face. The young president had been stunned, even confused. Oh, to have heard the words he had spoken to his staff after the Russian left the Oval Office! Galushka cursed his colleagues in the intelligence services for not being able to tell him that. Instead, he would have to wait a few decades until the American press made their documentaries and wrote their histories to find it out. But he knew what history's judgment of it all would be. The expulsion order would be seen as the starkest evidence yet that the United States was no longer a nation to be feared, and Galushka would be always remembered as the man who had delivered it. Without question, it would stand as the most glorious day of his career thus far, and perhaps the one that opened the door for him to ascend to the Kremlin's highest posts.

Now Galushka could not stop wondering whether the swift summons was not a sign that all of that was being threatened. Like a jury sent out of a courtroom to deliberate a case, a swift verdict was rarely good news for the accused. Now Rostow was being unpredictable. The young president should have accepted his humiliation. Of course, it was expected he would expel a few Russians from Washington in a weak bid to save face. Reagan had expelled fifty-five diplomats in 1986 as retaliation for Gorbachev's eviction of five CIA spies, the kind of disproportionate act the Russian people had come to expect from the cowboy president. Bush the younger had expelled fifty in 2001 after Robert Hannsen's treachery was revealed, but to be fair, that traitor's work had allowed the Kremlin to execute several CIA assets.

But Rostow was no Bush, much less a Reagan, and the man was running for reelection. Politicians like him preferred to rely on the electorate's short memories and bury such embarrassments as deep as they could, and the American president was not following that model. Galushka was concerned. He replayed the secretary of state's call through his mind, asking him to return to the White House. The Russian had asked to know why and the secretary had refused to tell him. The Russian had frowned at that, but no one around him had noticed, the expression being too close to the ambassador's usual appearance.

The chauffeur opened his door and Galushka dismounted onto the asphalt outside the East Wing entrance. The Russian followed the usual security escorts, expecting to be taken to the Oval Office, which route he knew well. His only notice that he would not be following that route came when the man ahead of him slowed to direct him into a room to the north from the center hall. The Russian, focused on his own thoughts, had not been watching his escort and stumbled into him.

Galushka walked through the open door. He'd not been here before, but he came to recognize the White House library, remembering it vaguely from some photograph he'd seen years before. It was a small space, perhaps twenty feet by thirty, decorated in the style of the late Federal period, with soft gray and rose tones coloring the wall panels. It was dimly lit at the moment, the fire in the hearth illuminating the room as much as the gilded wood chandelier above the round table in its center. Galushka was sure that the many books on the shelves were American classics, if any tome written by Western authors ever could be called such. He'd never cared enough to read any of them. Russia's own literary tradition was too rich and deep for him to waste his time on the scribblings produced by so young a country.

The Secret Service escort closed the door behind Galushka and took up a position in the corner to watch the husky diplomat. The Russian waited for his eyes to adjust to the low light. He wasn't a young man anymore and they didn't make the change as quickly as they once had.

“Do you know what this room was used for, originally?” Galushka finally saw President Daniel Rostow standing before the east wall, looking up at a row of books on one of the shelves.

“Mr. President,” Galushka acknowledged, “I do not. I have never been in this room.”

“It was the White House laundry,” Rostow explained. “For almost exactly a hundred years, this is where the staff cleaned up dirty clothes.”

Galushka looked around at his surroundings. “It is a more useful space now, I think.”

“Oh, yes,” Rostow agreed. “Though occasionally it still serves its old purpose.”

Galushka frowned, unsure what the young president meant by that. Rostow turned around, made his way to one of two facing chairs before the fireplace, and directed the Russian ambassador to the other. “I'm sure you know why I asked you to come tonight, Igor Nikolayevich.”

“You wish to respond to our expulsion of your cadre of spies in Moscow,” Galushka replied. He wanted to smile but it would not have been diplomatic, and he was out of practice anyway.

“That's right, Igor, I do,” Rostow concurred. The president of the United States reached over to the table, picked up a large manila envelope, and offered it to the Russian ambassador. “In response to your unprecedented expulsion of so many U.S. diplomats and their families from your soil without provocation, the United States government hereby requires the Russian Federation to withdraw the following individuals and their families from our soil within the next five days. The secretary of state will deliver the formal paperwork to your embassy in the morning, but I wanted to personally give you the advance notice so the people on the list could start packing up tonight.”

Galushka opened the envelope and withdrew the contents, surprised to find two pieces of folded paper inside. He straightened them and his eyes widened. Both papers were filled with names, top to bottom, split into two columns on each. He tried to estimate the full total. “There are over two hundred names here,” the ambassador protested.