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34

K
AY HAD
drunk half a bottle of wine over dinner two hours earlier—at the time she had not anticipated going from the Thanksgiving table directly back into the world of international espionage—but she felt absolutely sober; had felt that way as soon as she picked up the phone and heard Jeffries's voice. Family was maddening, and impossible to get a handle on, and an open sore—but this? This came naturally, came smoothly. Kay had never felt so certain that she was doing what she was meant to do. She could feel herself rising to the occasion, making decisions and giving orders with calculated thought but no hesitation.

Kay managed to hail a cab outside of her uncle's apartment building, told the driver to take off to the Bureau's downtown office, resisted the temptation to encourage him to speed. Then she sprinted through Security and into the office that had been set aside for the Black Bear op, greeted Marshall with a peremptoriness bordering on rudeness, then hovered over the drawer of “hello” phones, waiting for Vadim to make second contact.

She did not have to wait long. The phone buzzed and Kay snatched it.

“Hello?” Vadim said.

“Mr. Conrad,” Kay said calmly, using Vadim's code name.

“Where the hell is Ms. Galway?” Vadim asked, likewise using Jeffries's own.

“Perhaps you've noticed, Mr. Conrad, that today is a holiday. Ms. Galway, like most of the rest of the country, is off celebrating it, and unfortunately not in a position to assist you. I assure you, however, that Ms. Galway has placed her unreserved confidence in me and that I'm in a position to handle your situation just as adeptly and competently as Ms. Galway would.” “Hell, I hope that's true,” Kay thought.

“This isn't the way this is supposed to occur,” Vadim said, and Kay could hear the way his fear had eaten him down.

“And yet this is the way it will,” Kay said smoothly, doing her best to radiate a subtle blend of comfort and absolute confidence, as if the matter were already settled. Handling an asset was, in some ways, similar to interrogating a subject. The impor­tant thing was to retain control at all times, never to act surprised by any unexpected development, as if everything were unfolding according to a plan that you alone were aware of. “Trust us, Mr. Conrad. We know what we're doing; we'll keep you safe. Of course, should you be disinterested in availing yourself of our hospitality, you're more than welcome to throw yourself on the tender graces of your colleagues . . .”

Vadim cursed awhile, Kay's limited grasp of Russian insufficient to follow the nuances, though it sounded serious. Russian is quite a language for swear words, Kay had long ago realized. “All right,” Vadim said. “Where are we meeting?”

“Are you familiar with the Sixty-Fifth Street entrance to Central Park?”

“East side or west?”

“West. On the third bench in from the entrance, in one hour, you will find a white woman with dark hair wearing a gray trench
coat. That woman will be me, and I'll be in a position to bring you home.”

“My new home or my old one?” Vadim said, rather cheekily for a man about to defect to a foreign country.

“Home is where the heart is, Mr. Conrad,” Kay said. “And on behalf of the American people, let me say just how thrilled we'll be to see to your repatriation.”

Vadim barked out a laugh. “Central Park, one hour,” he said, then hung up the phone.

But Kay was there in half an hour, she and Marshall doing a lap around the area, keeping an eye out for anything unexpected, anything out of place. It was here, Kay knew, that they would miss Jeffries's expertise, not to mention the assistance of the rest of their Black Bear colleagues. The entire thing had happened so quickly—between Vadim's contacting them and the defection only a couple of hours had elapsed—that it seemed unlikely the SVR would have had time to get wind of it. Although, on the other hand, it seemed more than unlikely that the SVR could have sniffed Vadim out as a potential traitor, it seemed all but impossible, and yet here they were.

Still, when Kay took a seat at the bench, ten minutes before her meeting with Vadim, she felt reasonably confident—­confident, at least, in how she had handled the situation so far, if not necessarily at the outcome. She had been thrown a hell of a curveball, but with a little bit of luck she might end this chilly Thanksgiving evening with an intelligence coup that could provide the answers to their Black Bear investigation. Kay rubbed vigorously at her legs to try to keep warm, checked that the microphone attached to her lapel was working. “Marshall, you hear me?”

“Five by five,” he echoed back in her earbud. “You ready for this?”

“You tell me.”

“Hell, from where I'm sitting, you look like you could take care of this with one arm tied behind your back.”

Kay appreciated the vote of confidence but wasn't sure that it was deserved. She focused intently on the surroundings, tried to bite down tight on the flutter of nerves from her stomach. Central Park was quiet, all but silent, the usual pedestrians inside celebrating the holiday or just avoiding the dark and the cold. Apart from the occasional transient passing through, and one late-evening jogger trying to make up for a Thanksgiving feast, the park was empty. Kay made Vadim out almost before Marshall alerted her to his arrival. “Subject is crossing up Central Park West,” he said.

Vadim, as sharp-eyed and nervous as Kay, noticed her as well, giving a little motion with his head that was not quite an acknowledgment. Kay responded with a shake of one hand that might have been simply a woman trying to keep her extremities warm, and the SVR double began to walk rapidly towards her.

Kay's heart was in her throat. Coming towards her, at this very moment, so close she could almost grab him, was the potential key to the Black Bear operation, an intelligence coup of the first order. So close that she could almost smell the reek of his aftershave; so close that she could nearly make out his chin stubble.

Distantly, from someplace beyond her excitement, Kay heard the sound of tires screeching, noticed something moving swiftly from outside her field of vision. She screamed a warning into her microphone and leaped off the bench, heading for Vadim at a tear. Vadim noticed it a moment after Kay had, turned his head to see the van speeding towards him. Kay screamed a second warning, turned her run into a sprint, knowing all the while that she wouldn't be able to make it, watching furiously as a burly man ripped open the sliding door of his vehicle, stepped forward
and placed something against Vadim's neck. The spark of light that came next revealed it to be a Taser, as did Vadim's reaction, his knees collapsing out from under him as he fumbled forward to the ground. He'd have received a nasty wound if the thug in the van hadn't grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him inside, the entire operation taking no more than a few seconds.

Just as Kay made it to the park entrance, the door of the van slammed shut, and her last images of Artur Vadim were ones of blind and horrified terror. Then the van streaked off downtown and was lost in the night, leaving a furious Kay behind, screaming in futility at the exhaust.

35

K
AY WAS
back at her apartment, staring blankly at a wall, running through the events of the second-worst day of her life, when an unknown number came up on her phone. She let it ring awhile, because who could possibly be on the other end of the phone who would make her day better? Perhaps it was Vadim, calling to announce that he'd found his way free of his SVR captors, was safely ensconced in a nearby McDonald's, a vanilla milk shake in one hand, and could Kay spring over and pick him up so he could tell her the secret identity of their mole?

“Hello,” Kay said into her mouthpiece, with no particular enthusiasm.

“Is this Kay Malloy? Agent Kay Malloy?”

“I don't want to be part of any survey, and if you're selling something, I don't want to buy it, either.”

“This is Officer Talloway, NYPD, at the Eighteenth Precinct. Do you have a brother named Christopher Malloy?”

He had overdosed in a hallway in Bed-Stuy, Kay thought. No, he had put back a fifth of gin and gone for a long drive down Eastern Parkway, clipped a janitor coming back from a long day of work, two bodies for the beleaguered NYPD to scrape off the asphalt. “Yes,” Kay said flatly.

“We've got him in lockup, awaiting processing. He was intoxicated outside a club, acted belligerent with one of our officers. He asked that we give you a call. Normally we'd run him through booking, but as a professional courtesy . . .” Officer Talloway left the rest of the thought unexpressed.

Afterward would come the slow swelling rage like a boil, but right at that moment there was only an enormous sense of relief. “I'll be down in forty minutes,” Kay said.

She did not ask Officer Talloway for any favors, but she had not made a point of refusing them, and he had agreed to write Christopher up for drunk and disorderly while looking the other way on whatever else Christopher had been up to. Afterward Talloway asked if she had a phone number, and she told him it was classified to try and keep the conversation professional. He smiled and said maybe he'd try and suss it out, but Kay had no more notion of romance with him than a rattlesnake. She hadn't seen it coming, but Andrew was a presence in her life.

He came out of lockup whistling, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slumped, looking like an eight-year-old boy caught with his hand in a cookie jar. He made some sort of joke when he saw her, although she didn't really hear it, her eyes hard on his, walking him out of the station and out to the parking lot and into her car. Kay drove six blocks without saying anything, saw what she was looking for, pulled a hard right into a small parking lot, got a ticket from the automatic machine; it was five dollars for twenty minutes, but at that moment she felt willing to pay the fee.

“Where we going?” Christopher asked, but Kay didn't answer, just headed up to the top floor and parked in a distant corner of the lot and shut off the car.

She opened the door and got out of the car, stretched down to her toes, then stretched back up and from side to side. Chris
topher lit a cigarette just about as soon as he was outside, and she let him drag off of it for a second before punching him hard enough to send his American Spirit spinning off into the darkness.

“Are you out of your mind?”
she screamed, and there was a moment when she had to stop herself from going after him on the ground, she was still so choked with rage. “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?” she screamed again, louder, loud enough to wake the neighbors. “You get busted drunk and you drop my name! It's not enough you shit all over
your
life, you've got to scrap mine in the process. You're a leech, you're a goddamned leech,” she said. “And one of these days you're going to push me too far, Christopher, I swear to God you will, and I'll drop you. And who will you have left after that, huh? Is there anyone else in your life that you haven't pushed away entirely?”

Christopher sat up straight, rubbed at his jaw for a moment. Then he smiled and lit another cigarette. “Rough day?” he asked.

And somehow that did it. She could feel the evening's hysteria seep through her pores and out with her breath. Suddenly she was drained of rage, like a lanced boil. Her shoulders slumped. She reached over and helped Christopher to his feet.

“You might say that,” Kay said. Kay held on to him awhile after he was upright, maybe even leaned against him a little.

“Feel like talking about it?”

“Over a cup of coffee, maybe.”

“My treat,” Christopher said, holding his sleeve to his nose and leading the way to the car. “By the by, can I borrow five dollars?”

She laughed and opened the door and slipped inside.

Another car had come in after them—odd, given how late it was—but Kay was too exhausted to notice.

36

W
HEN
K
AY
finished her briefing on what had happened with Vadim, Jeffries tensed her hands on her desk ever so slightly. All the time and effort they had put into trying to recruit him, all the subtle maneuverings, all the future plans, gone completely. Not to mention the human element: Vadim had not seemed so terrible, for a traitor to his country, and even so, he had been Jeffries's traitor. The bond between a handler and an asset was not a friendship, and certainly Jeffries had been in the business long enough to know that, but still, certain feelings begin to creep in. Now Vadim was in some basement in Moscow, an SVR officer working him over with a length of rubber pipe or subjecting him to some other, more ingenious and terrible method of torture. His next destination would be an unmarked grave, his family pawned off with some obvious falsehood or other.

It was a heavy thing to carry. Apart from the brief fluttering of her hands, however, Jeffries proved as steady as always. “Thank you for your efforts,” she said evenly. “Of course I'll expect a formal report as soon as possible.”

“Of course,” Kay said, standing and plodding miserably to the exit.

“It's like baseball,” Jeffries said suddenly, just as Kay was about to exit. “You get more outs than hits.”

Which was the general tenor of the office. It wasn't like the Rashid Williams case: no one blamed her. Marshall and Wilson had been openly complimentary: for an Agent with her relative lack of experience, she had done excellently; the damn SVR had just done that little bit better. Andrew had spent a few furious moments after he had heard almost theatrically angry, but had calmed himself down quickly and even in the midst of his tantrum had not called out Kay for incompetence. No, there was broad agreement that Kay had done the best she could with a difficult job, thrust into an unexpected and uncontrolled situation. Things hadn't worked out, but things sometimes didn't.

The only person who did not accept this comforting explanation was Kay herself. In the days and weeks after the event, she went over that late Thanksgiving evening again and again, in intimate detail, running through every moment in her memory. If she had been a step quicker, a few IQ points smarter, some tiny bit luckier . . .

When Kay wasn't berating herself for her perceived failure, she was eating, breathing, sleeping the matrix. She would fall asleep to vivid dreams of boredom, sitting in a cubicle and clicking through personnel files. Sometimes in the dreams she found that somehow she herself had been put in the matrix, or sometimes Christopher, or Andrew, or Luis, or Jeffries. She scrolled through histories of their past misdeeds, sifted through their various venial sins for something outright cardinal. She would wake up the next morning more drained than when she had fallen asleep, then grab a cup of coffee and go right back to work.

But the new year rolled around without any success, Kay's nocturnal investigations no more productive than waking. Jef
fries put the best face she could on it, but the simple fact of the matter was that the investigation had stalled. They were out of recruits—the SVR had eaten up each of them—and there was no new information to add to what they were already using. They would need to start over from the beginning, search for another potential RIP, go through the long, slow process of researching him. Meanwhile the matrix beckoned, and Kay gave in to its siren's call, not only while at work but on her off hours—lunch breaks, late evenings, the occasional weekend afternoon—trying to seize on that one critical piece of information she had missed that would crack the whole thing wide open and would redeem her failure with Vadim.

That winter was long and cruel for many people in New York, but it was longer and crueler for Kay than most.