The Fall of Moscow Station (34 page)

The woman nodded. “ ‘To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.' ” Kyra smiled at him. “Right now they needed someone to do a ‘very special thing' that was fitted to you. They needed someone who could fly right under the Russians' radar, and you did. I know that carrying a bag around doesn't seem like much, but if everything works out, what you just did is going to help a lot of people. Your moment came and you stepped up . . . your finest moment, until you have a bigger one. You should be proud of that.”

Ettleman tried not to gape at the woman who had just turned his anxiety into elation with a few words. She nodded toward the nylon bag. “I assume that's for me?” she asked.

She was looking at his laptop bag. “Oh, yeah,” Ettleman said. He offered it and Kyra took it from him. She unzipped it and looked inside.

“I don't know even know what's in it—”

“A quarter million euros,” Kyra said. She pulled out one of the bundles and rifled through the bills to prove the point. “And a disguise kit and a false passport, all sent through the diplomatic pouch from Langley.”

“A quarter . . .
million
?” Ettleman repeated in quiet surprise, his voice quavering, much to his embarrassment. He looked inside. The bag held euros, all €500 banknotes. The foreign service officer didn't know the day's exchange rate, but he was sure that he'd been carrying more than his annual salary, enough that any Russian thug would have gutted him for the pile without a thought. “They told me not to open it. I didn't, swear to—”

“I believe you,” the woman assured him.

Idiot
, he thought.
Now she thinks you didn't have the stones to even check out what you were carrying around.
“I mean, I wanted to, but I thought, maybe, you know, operational security—”

“You followed your orders. That means you're not stupid.” She exhaled, then smiled, sheepish, which sent Ettleman's heart rate up again. “I'm sorry, that was rude of me. It's been a tough week and I've . . . the guy who trained me was kind of blunt and I've picked up the habit.”

“That's okay,” Ettleman said. He would've forgiven this woman of murder if she would smile at him again. “They said you'd need a few other things?”

The woman nodded. “Nothing exotic,” she advised. “I'll raid your closet later. Do you have a laptop and a printer?” Ettleman nodded. “Unplug everything from the Internet and shut down any wireless connections you have running. You're fluent in Russian? I need to type a letter and I'll need you to translate it after I'm done. And a hot shower would be very kind.”

“Oh, uh, sure,” Ettleman said. “The shower is at the end of the hall. I'll get you a towel.”

“That would be lovely, thank you.” Kyra smiled at him again. “And you don't have to be nervous. You're doing fine.” Then she turned away and headed for his shower.

The man's heart soared and sank at the same time. Maybe he'd applied for the wrong career after all, Ettleman thought. Delivering huge piles of money to strange and attractive women who showed up in his apartment, reading his mind through his body language and asking for his services and amenities? He could get used to that.

U.S. Embassy

Moscow, Russia

A craft
, her father had once explained,
is a marriage between science and art. You have to master the science before you can aspire to the art.

Kyra was an analyst now, but she'd been a case officer once and had worked the street before. She understood both the science and the art of it. She'd been in war zones before, had been involved in some serious fights, violence and gunfire coming from plain enemies out to do her harm. Street work was different; it was subtlety and advance planning. There was a learning curve to it, but just knowing the science of a spy's tradecraft would not be enough here. It was not a place for beginners and Kyra was wondering now whether she truly was ready to face the Kremlin machine. The Russians were efficient and unforgiving. They had practiced on these streets for a century now and Kyra was neither stupid nor arrogant enough to imagine that her experience and intelligence alone put her on equal ground with them anywhere on earth, much less here.

This was their home. They knew it intimately and would defend it. She was the criminal, the invader, the thief come to rob and steal. She was the villain here.

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.

A brick wall rose up on her left, the boundary of the embassy compound. She passed a security camera suspended over the sidewalk.
Please tell me you saw this
, she thought.

The gate would be closed. Embassy security would open it only when approved vehicles approached. Beyond the gate was the small security building.

The wall flew by on Kyra's left, the bricks melting into a single red blur, and she moved her legs faster than she ever had before.
Almost there.

The brick wall fell away and she saw the gated entrance, then the embassy beyond, the American flag flying unfurled in the courtyard, brilliant colors in the high-powered spotlights. She heard the screeching tires of the van chasing behind her.

A man leaned out of the security building door . . . embassy security. He reached for her, to pull her inside, where she would be safe. They'd seen her running on the camera and opened the door. Barron had told them that she would be coming—

Kyra felt the hit between her shoulder blades, sending her sprawling forward. She got her hands up before hitting the ground, stopping the concrete from stripping the skin from her face, but she went down in a rolling heap. She struggled to pull herself to her feet, then lunged toward the American guard at the door—