The Fall of Moscow Station (5 page)

Maines looked at the sheet and started to rock back in surprise before he caught himself. He stared at the paper, a copy of an Interpol Blue Notice with his photograph . . . the one from his Agency badge, in fact.

Maines, Alden

WANTED BY THE JUDICIAL AUTHORITIES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR PROSECUTION

IDENTITY PARTICULARS

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION

CHARGES Published as provided by requesting entity

Lavrov smiled. “You will tell me what I need to know, and once that is done, I will take you to Moscow and see to it that you get a permit for work and residency. I will also help you secure an apartment. That should be enough for you to start building a life.”

Maines's face twisted in disbelief at the words. “What I know is worth millions of dollars, tens of millions, and I'm only asking for a fraction of that.”

“Mr. Maines, please.” Lavrov shook his head in pity. “I am surprised that someone who has lived in the United States so long should have such a poor understanding of capitalism.” He paused, then leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. Each empty second stretched out in the air. Finally he spoke. “Intelligence secrets are strange things. We collect them at great cost, and they are valuable not because they tell us what to do, but because they tell us what not to do. They prevent mistakes of judgment and save us the costs of wrong guesses. And yet, once such a secret is revealed, it loses all its power. The enemy realizes that we know his secret and changes his behavior. He shuts off the means by which we stole his secrets. We lose the power of the secret itself and some of our ability to gather more through the same means. So the cost of collecting our enemy's secrets goes up.”

Lavrov leaned forward again, his features hardening. “One does not pay a mole to reveal his country's secrets. One pays a mole for his access, which is much more valuable. Time destroys the value of any information he gives up, no matter how important. Secrets are just another perishable commodity and a mole is the broker. We pay a broker not for his product, but for his ability to provide that product.” Lavrov leaned back, gathered his thoughts again, then smiled. “Now you have no access and you are a wanted man. So you need my protection and the only currency you have to barter for it is the information you have in your head. And without the ability to acquire more, what you have devalues as we speak. Your value to me diminishes by the hour. So, cooperate now and we will grant you residency with no extradition. From time to time, we will use you to embarrass your government and highlight its hypocrisy, and you will smile and cooperate with our networks and newspapers to do it.”

Maines ground his teeth together, his face flushing red. “I'll take my information to someone else.”

“A poor threat,” Lavrov advised. “If you will not share your information with us, then your only value to me will lie entirely in the goodwill I will earn from the Germans and the Americans when I walk you out the front door where the German federal police will be waiting.”

Maines's head was throbbing now. His desire to murder Lavrov right here, smash his brains out against the table, almost overcame his own desire for self-preservation. The driver was still outside the door, and he was probably Spetsnaz, more than a match for a mildly obese CIA officer just past his prime. But this was all beyond his control . . . not how this meeting was supposed to have gone. He couldn't even walk out of the embassy now. “So why not just toss me in a cell?”

“You're not a prisoner,” Lavrov told him. “You are just not in a position of leverage.”

“So that guard outside the door is just a free concierge service you offer all of your clients?” Maines asked. He suspected the sarcasm would be lost on the Russian.

“Not at all,” Lavrov said. “He will make sure you do not roam the embassy. You were a CIA officer, and there is always the possibility that you are not a true defector. We don't want you to steal any more of our secrets than you already have.” The Russian pushed away from the table and smiled. “I do enjoy honesty. Do you not, Mr. Maines? We get so few opportunities to indulge in it. It is a rare delicacy for men of our occupation.”

“I don't think you want me to indulge in honesty much right now,” Maines warned him.

“So long as you are truthful when you give us the names, the rest I will forgive,” Lavrov replied. “But it is not in your interest for any negotiation to drag on. Time is no friend of yours now. I suggest you make your decision within the next day or so.”

Lavrov stepped outside into the hall and closed the door behind him. Maines heard his footsteps shuffle away from the small room and was left to listen to the buzz of the harsh lights and his own thoughts.

Office of the Deputy Director of National Intelligence

Liberty Crossing Complex

McLean, Virginia

Kathy Cooke's new office was quite austere. Six months into her new appointment, the former CIA director had enjoyed little time to arrange it to her liking. Papers sat in manila folders organized in neat stacks on the desk, edges aligned as with a ruler. Personal trophies that meant nothing to anyone but the owner occupied the shelves that other people would have used for books, including several ceremonial weapons that were probably illegal to have in a federal building. There were no diplomas or performance awards hanging on the walls, and the pictures were all of family, with none of the usual vanity photos of the occupant shaking hands with this president or that foreign leader. Humility was a rare trait among senior government officials, but Cooke had learned early on that a healthy dose of meekness tended to save her a lot of trouble later on.

She'd always kept her office at CIA mostly impersonal for the duration of her five-year tenure, in no small part because she'd never expected to hold the job very long. Leaders at that level of government service tended to have short terms in office, usually lasting only until some new president was elected. That she had survived under two surprised her more than anyone else, and Rostow had made it no secret that he'd wanted her out. She hadn't really wanted to retire from the job, but the president was no respecter of the Agency and Cooke had resisted his maneuvering more to protect the people at Langley than out of any personal ambition. Had Rostow been a better man, she would have been happy to retire. She wasn't yet fifty, her professional options would have been legion, and she and Jon could finally have gotten on with the personal life they'd kept on hold for too long.

Jon
, she thought. Cooke hadn't seen the chief of CIA's Red Cell for almost a month now. Langley was just a few miles up the road to the northeast, but her promotion had put more distance between them than the geography. Her schedule was hardly conducive to having any kind of personal life.

Cooke had no idea how her boss had convinced the chief executive to promote her. She hadn't wanted the job, had even thought about rejecting it when the DNI had called. But she served at the pleasure of the president, even when the man was a hostile, arrogant cuss. The Senate had confirmed her fairly quickly, and the only votes not cast in her favor had been abstentions.

She'd decided to give it three years. Three years would satisfy her sense of duty, she thought, and then she would walk away. But there were still issues to resolve before that happened. The most distressing was the one she could do the least about at the moment.

Cooke stared down at the copy of
Der Spiegel.
CIA had attached a printed translation of the lead article on the German daily's front page.

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.

Flughafen Berlin-Tegel Airport

Tegel, Borough of Reinickendorf

Berlin, Germany

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.