Palace of Treason (46 page)

She had two weeks to live. That realization, and Putin’s silky invitation to the seaside mansion on the Gulf of Finland, finally had been the trigger to feverish thought that morphed into a plan—impossible, suicidal—she knew she would carry out: Ruin the
piyavki,
the leeches that attached themselves thick on the belly of the country. She would do it, if it was her last act. She could feel the urgency in her chest. She punched in two SRAC messages and went for a drive to transmit them to one of the sensors, thinking about blond Hannah.
Pass the word,
sestrenka,
my little sister.

MESSAGE 35. URGENT. ZARUBINA REPORTS TRITON WILL DELIVER NAME OF RUSSIAN MOLE, HIGH DEGREE OF CERTAINTY, AT MEETING IN TWO WEEKS AT SITE RUSALKA. NO OTHER DETAILS. olga.

 

MESSAGE 36. INVITATION TO STRELNA BY PREZ IN NEXT TEN DAYS. WILL USE TRIP TO DELIVER LYRIC TO EXFIL SITE EARLY MORNING 12TH. INITIATE RED ROUTE TWO. olga.

The two SRAC messages from DIVA hit Moscow and Athens Stations and Langley insanely hard, “like the deaf ring a church bell,” said Gable. Benford was on the secure phone to both Stations, issuing instructions like a man possessed, which he was. He asked for Forsyth’s concurrence to bring Nate back to Washington: He needed a street operator to manage his nascent plan to prevent—at all costs—TRITON from making the meeting
with Zarubina and passing that name. He drafted the SRAC message replies to DIVA himself, and ordered Hannah to load them into the sensor system.

MESSAGE 35 REPLY. PRESUME RUSALKA IS AT COORDS PREVIOUSLY SENT. CAN YOU CONFIRM LOCATION AND EXACT DATE?

 

MESSAGE 36 REPLY. UNDER NO/NO CIRCUMSTANCES ATTEMPT TO EXFILTRATE SUBJECT. IMPERATIVE YOU RESERVE RED ROUTE TWO FOR YOUR EXCLUSIVE USE. REQUEST EMERG MEETING AT SITE SKLAD TOMORROW. ACKNOWLEDGE.

COS Moscow Throckmorton, inflated with the urgency of the crisis, telephoned Benford that he would personally make the rendezvous with DIVA to tell her to stand down. “This requires gravitas, a senior hand,” he said to Benford.

“Vern, you will do nothing of the sort,” raved Benford, knowing that this red-assed baboon would lead half the FSB to the meeting. “You let Archer do this. It’s why she’s out there. Am I clear?” He got a mumbled assent.

The SRAC messages were being exchanged rapidly now. DCOS Schindler had to forego her afternoon gin-rocks to drive past sensor three to unload DIVA’s fractious reply—the famous message 37:

MESSAGE 37. MEETING AT SKLAD TOMORROW ACKNOWLEDGED. WILL NOT ABANDON LYRIC. WILL NOT STAND DOWN ON EXFIL. HE AND I WILL BE ON EXFIL BEACH MORNING OF 12TH. BE ADVISED HE CANNOT WALK ON WATER. olga.

Hannah was sitting at her little desk in the Moscow Station enclosure, munching on a pastrami sandwich from the embassy cafeteria. The Russian cafeteria cooks managed to mangle most of the American items on the menu with the addition of inexplicable ingredients—pickle relish in the lasagna or blanched walnuts in the mac and cheese—but for some reason produced a delectable pastrami sandwich. Perhaps the Slavic love affair with salamis, sausages, pickled beef, cured hams, and peppered salt pork
fat stirred them to treat pastrami the right way. The sandwich was rich with cheese and scallions and vinegary coleslaw. A plastic condiment cup of peppery orange
khrenovina
relish came with the sandwich—the cooks behind the cafeteria counter called the sauce
vyrviglaz,
yank-out-the-eye—but Hannah didn’t even open the container. The last thing she needed was to begin feeling the volcano effects of
khrenovina
in the fourth hour of tonight’s SDR. This was a screamingly critical meeting, a make-or-break, as a tense-sounding Benford had explained to her over the secure phone.

“Hannah, talk her down off whatever messianic high she’s on,” Benford hissed over the phone. “For fuck’s sake, she
will not
jeopardize herself in this way. I don’t care how you do it, lie to her, tell her the maritime assets are not available, tell her the site is compromised—shit, tell her I had a heart attack and am in intensive care. The last may not be an untruth in twelve hours.”

“I don’t give it that long,” said Hannah, trying for a combination of confident airiness and reassuring familiarity.
Shouldn’t have said it.

“Hannah Emmeline Archer,” said Benford, after a systole-thumping silence.
How did he know my middle name, and why was he using it like Daddy used to?
“I have always appreciated your youthful enthusiasm. I commend your performance in Moscow. But from today, do not endeavor to make a joke unless I specifically indicate that you should do so by saying ‘be funny.’ ”
Just like Daddy,
thought Hannah. Her sandwich was half eaten, and would remain so.

“Simon, you picked me for this assignment,” said Hannah. “You didn’t make a mistake. I’ll talk to her.”

“Thank you, Hannah,” said Benford. “The appropriate benediction is the one case officers in our service have said to one another for more than sixty years.
Good hunting.
” There was a pause. “And God bless,” said Benford, the agnostic misanthrope who prayed before his own triptych of lying, cheating, and stealing. The connection ended with the hollow, rushing-water noise of the secure line.

Nearly time to kick off. She had budgeted eight hours for the SDR—the meeting was for eleven—and she had to get this balls-on right. Get black, stay black, and no mistakes. No such thing as an abort tonight. Hannah came back to her desk, reviewed the SKLAD site report and photographs, looked over the SDR route she had plotted months ago and which had been reviewed and approved first by COS (not that he ran SDRs), then at Headquarters. She
could run it in her sleep. She was dressed in dark slacks and a cable-knit sweater, and she swapped her flats for woolen socks and low rubber-soled boots. She sanitized her pockets, emptying cell phone, house keys, and wallet into the credenza above the desk. She took only the small diplomatic identification booklet issued by the Russian Foreign Ministry and her car keys.

It was too cold to go with her hard-shell outer jacket—after sunset it was turning seriously frosty—so Hannah slipped on a heavy Russian-cut, wool-lined black coat with a black wool collar and cuffs and big buttons down the front. Once clear of the embassy and into her SDR, Hannah would tie a dark scarf on her head babushka-style, to break the profile and hide her blond hair. She slipped the sausage-shaped thermal scope into an inside pocket of her coat. Final check, ready to go.
Dominika, you
have
to listen to me,
Hannah thought.
It’s my job to keep you in one piece.

Hannah squeezed past two modular desks and knocked on the plastic sliding door to COS’s office for a quick word before she kicked off her run. Per Benford’s instructions, she had been unwaveringly deferential to the fustian Vern Throckmorton, despite the growing evidence of his incompetence and his chronic failure to realize what a mooncalf he was. He realized that Hannah was in his Station per Benford’s direct orders and at first did not challenge Hannah’s ops plans. Increasingly, however, Throckmorton began conflating Hannah’s successes with his management of the Station, and had become obstreperous. Hannah patiently dealt with him and did not complain to Benford, thus sparing COS the bureaucratic equivalent of a rigid sigmoidoscopy with a triangular endoscope.
It might still come to that,
thought Hannah.
This crash dive with DIVA is giving COS a woody—he wants to be a hero.

“He’s gone,” said a voice from the other end of the trailer. DCOS Irene Schindler was standing in her office, having slid the door open. Hannah turned and walked the length of the room toward her.

“Irene, will you tell him I had to kick off before he got back? I’ll leave the box of tissues on the rear shelf of my car in the parking lot to signal you guys thumbs-up when I get home.” Schindler leaned against the frame of the door and blinked.
She’s half toasted,
thought Hannah.

“He went to meet DIVA,” Schindler said.

“What do you mean he went to meet DIVA?” said Hannah. A shocky wave ran up her back, over the crown of her head, and down her arms.

“He said what DIVA needed was plain talk. He was—”

“Irene, shut the fuck up,” said Hannah. “How was he going to get to the site? He doesn’t even know where it is. What car is he driving? What route is he taking?”

Schindler put up her hand. “He read the site report. He has his own route. He’s been doing this for years,” said Schindler.

“Irene, I have to go,” said Hannah, now in a panic. “Listen to me. You have to get on the secure phone to Benford. His number is on my desk. Listen! Tell him what happened. Tell him I’m going to try to beat COS to the site, to warn DIVA away. Are you listening?”

Schindler nodded. Hannah looked at her, took two steps up to her, inside Irene’s aerosolized gin bubble, and took her by the shoulders. She could feel the balsa-wood bones under her hands. Hannah fought for control, resisted the impulse to shake her head off her shoulders.

“Irene, you have to do this immediately,” Hannah whispered. “We have to protect DIVA, you and me, okay? You used to do this shit right. Dude, dredge up whatever you have left and help me.” Hannah looked in her eyes. “I’ve got to go.” She kept her hands on Schindler’s shoulders for a second longer.

“Get your hands off me,” said Irene. “I have to make a phone call.”

Hannah broke about a dozen rules for a proper SDR, pushing her little Skoda hard, pulling provocative move after provocative move to flush coverage. There was nothing, and she had to trust she was not on the list tonight—she was black. She vectored east through heavy evening traffic, then south, entering Lyubertsy, a desolated district of warehouses and truck parks. She used her mirrors to mark cars that turned when she did, stripping “possibles” one by one until she was alone. Hannah waited in silence for fifteen minutes, then dumped her car in a deserted construction site and set off on foot. Maybe the car would be there when she got back—it was fifty-fifty. She had another forty minutes to walk.

Site SKLAD was along a fenced-in walkway that skirted a darkened warehouse. In the opposite direction, the walkway ascended in a rusty steel-and-rivet staircase to cross above the electric wires over tracks for the
elektrichka
commuter train. Cavernous warehouse after warehouse stretched into the darkness, a grid square of oily access roads between them creating a maze of muddy lanes illuminated by the few mercury vapor lights that weren’t burned out. Dogs roamed the warehouse grounds and they howled at the shrill whistle of a locomotive as it rumbled through, shaking the tin roofs of the warehouses. It was a muddy, rusty, decrepit, barbed-wire-wrapped, paint-flaking, ramshackle Gomorrah—in other words, suburban Moscow.

The air was still and crackling cold as Hannah ghosted past dark warehouses smelling of machine oil and iron filings. She stopped at the corner of one of the buildings and used her scope to scan up the road, then back behind her, then down the two side lanes. Empty. No engine noise, no acrid whiff of a cigarette, the scope registered only the faint thermal bloom of the lamps on the sides of the warehouses. She proceeded to the next corner and checked the four points of the compass again. Clear. She checked her watch and wondered if her COS was coming in with a horde of surveillants on his ass. With luck, he had gotten lost and was leading the opposition in circles on the ring road.

Hannah got to the walkway and silently ghosted up the steps to the elevated span over the tracks. Another dark-green train rumbled beneath the walkway, the overhead power lines zinging and snapping arc-light flashes. The steel walkway swayed as the train passed, and Hannah squatted, holding on to the rusty handrail. From the elevated walkway, she could see for some distance over the cruciform length of the four lanes between the warehouses. There was no moon, and it started raining softly, dimpling the oily pools on the ground.

It happened in a rush, the curtain going up on a nightmare tableau that Hannah watched with disbelief. A lumbering figure was coming up the side lane directly in front of her, a pigeon-toed shuffle she recognized as Throckmorton’s. He had studied the site report and come straight to it. He was bundled in an overcoat and wore an enormous Muscovite fur hat on his head, big as a holiday fruitcake. His head was down, hunched into his shoulders, hands in his pockets, as he carefully stepped around puddles in the dirt.
Oblivious.
At a distance behind him, the hood of a blacked-out car peeked around the corner of a warehouse.
Dude, you dragged them here.
Hannah looked down the right-hand lane and saw another darkened car slow to a stop, and two dark silhouettes got out to stand in the shadows. Beyond a farther warehouse, another dark figure hugged the building to look around the corner. He started moving forward slowly—the others hung back.
Big team.
Hannah could feel her heart hammering in her jaw.

The nightmare got worse. With the instincts of an internal-ops officer, Hannah knew where to look next. Three buildings down on the left she saw another figure—thinner, head erect—walking slowly toward the intersection.
Jesus. It has to be DIVA.
Hannah watched, frozen, as the three figures—Throckmorton, DIVA, and the foot surveillant—converged in the night. They would arrive at the intersection simultaneously. More black silhouettes appeared on the wings. The hood of another car eased out around the first corner, and two more men—indistinct, wearing hats—stood behind it, watching.

Even as she moved silently down the stairway toward the muddy intersection, Hannah flashed to her father—not to Benford, or to DIVA or to Nate, she consciously marveled—and emerged at the end of the walkway, her head covered in her scarf, fur collar turned up. She was keyed up, breathing hard, yet icy cool in knowing what she was going to do. She
waited a beat, until Throckmorton saw her and drew up with a start. He was instantly swarmed by two men who rushed from behind and tackled him facedown in the mud, their knees on his neck, their hands wrenching his arms behind him. COS Moscow started a high, keening wail and flailed his legs until another man sat on them.

This had taken two seconds, and in the third second Hannah turned and sprinted to her right, up the muddy road, in the opposite direction of DIVA’s approach. The man coming in from the right yelled something and tried to cut her off, but Hannah had a step and got past him as he slipped in the mud and went down. More shouts—they were bellows of rage, of the hunt—and the sound of racing engines and the whine of mud-slick tires started up all around her. Throckmorton kept up his stuck-pig squeals.
That’s it boys,
Hannah thought,
make as much noise as you can.

The sound of footsteps was behind her, but they weren’t getting closer.
Just so they think they’ve flushed the Russian agent, come on you turkeys, don’t lose the rabbit.
She thought she might even get away, over a fence and across some tracks, rub their noses in the shit. The thermal scope was bumping her chest inside her coat; the more time they spent chasing her, the more time she would buy for DIVA.

The surveillance car—a muddy Volvo C30 with wipers going full tilt—came too fast out of a side alley between two warehouses and hit Hannah on the right hip with its left front bumper, throwing her twenty feet in the air and against the corrugated side of the warehouse on the other side of the lane. The car slid to a stop at an angle in the mud and the passenger got out and walked over to Hannah. The driver stood at the open door on his side, as if afraid to go near. The wipers slapped back and forth. Another car eased up to the scene, and four men ran up on foot. The rain had stopped.

Hannah had felt only an enormous blow on her side, and a flash, but woke on her back looking up at a circle of sweaty faces—eyebrows, Slavic cheekbones, moles, knit caps. She felt the pressure of the dirt beneath her body, but couldn’t feel her legs. She tried to find her hands, and thought she moved some fingers, but couldn’t see them. She tried to take a breath, but it felt like sucking air through a collapsed straw. The breathing part wasn’t the worst—she felt something loose inside. The silent, grave faces looked down at her, and she stared back at them. She wasn’t going to let them see her cry.
Dad, I saved her, I did. You would be proud of me, Daddy. I won’t let them see me cry, but come and bring me home.

The surveillance-team leader bent down and loosened the scarf from under Hannah’s chin and gently pulled it off—her head flopped to one side. The blond curls partially covered her peaceful face.

Dominika waited for an hour in the abandoned warehouse, looking out a cracked window down the muddy lane. There were two groups of people down the muddy street, both lit by the headlights of at least four vehicles that had appeared out of nowhere. The first group was holding a man who was bellowing something unintelligible as he was pushed into the backseat of a car. The second group of ten or a dozen men farther down the street were standing in a circle around a shape on the ground. It was too far to see, but when one of the men bent to take off a scarf, Dominika thought she could see a woman’s hair.

She had been two warehouses from the actual meeting site spot—not more than one hundred meters—and had flattened herself against the wall when she heard the shouts and engine noises. She saw running figures moving away from her, but the number of car noises all around shocked her, and she squeezed through a gap in a broken chain-link fence and crawled into the corroded bucket of a steam shovel that probably had last been used to excavate the Moscow Canal in 1932. Men and vehicles passed back and forth for about fifteen minutes with Dominika huddled in a ball in a slurry of rainwater and flaking rust. Things quieted down and Dominika was able to peek over the lip of the bucket. She wasn’t going anywhere for a while: FSB would leave a car with two men—silent trailers—in the area to see if anybody moved after things quieted down.

Marta and Udranka sat on packing crates near the door. You treated that young American a little hard, Marta said as Udranka tapped her foot. You see how everybody loves you?

Dominika shivered in the bucket and closed her eyes. She didn’t know what had happened, but Hannah was supposed to have been there, and Dominika had a dreadful intuition that Hannah was the figure on the
ground. The FSB would not knowingly harm a diplomat, but these surveillance men were feral pack hunters when they got the blood scent in their nostrils—the dogs were capable of anything.

Speaking of dogs. From around the corner of the warehouse Dominika saw two red eyes looking at her. They moved closer and became the black muzzle and hunched shoulders of an enormous dog—half dog, half wolf—which no doubt had slipped his leash somewhere in hell. The dog looked at Dominika, its visible breath drifting around its head in the cold air. A bark, a growl, much less an attack, would bring the FSB in a flash, but it was still, watching her with lowered head. Dominika remembered her childhood and what her father used to do with their little dachshund, Gustave, and she held out her hand. The massive dog hesitated and came closer, then closer, and sniffed.

What is your life, you devil?
Dominika thought, keeping her hand still. Men’s voices echoed off the warehouse walls.
Do they beat you and starve you? Do you hate them as I do? Do they fear you?
The dog looked into her eyes, turned, and shuffled into the darkness, looking back once as if to tell her
S volkami zhit, povolchi vyt,
to live with wolves, you have to howl like a wolf. Dominika silently thanked
Satana
’s dog. The devil had just told her what she had to do.

Benford could not move, could not think, could not speak. He had raved for twelve hours after receiving the call from DCOS Schindler alerting him that COS had gone out on the street to meet DIVA, and Hannah had gone after him. Nate arrived in Washington from Athens that evening in the middle of the crisis. He now sat on the couch in Benford’s office, jet-lagged and unshaven. Janice Callahan ferried in cups of coffee and tea, and Margery Salvatore brought containers of homemade
soupe au pistou
—hearty vegetable soup with basil puree—which would hold them over until the cafeteria downstairs opened. Benford’s lair filled with the smell of the Provençal comfort food, but no one was comforted—no one could eat.

They waited for word of disaster, for the exultant news on VGTRK, the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, that
the counterintelligence organs of the Federation’s intelligence services had unmasked another traitor, a criminal paid by the Main Enemy to betray her country—
Comrades, let’s revive the apt Cold War labels, for that is what the Americans are: Russia’s Main Enemy
—and was now in custody waiting for the investigation to conclude and the trial to begin. Benford had spoken several times to a shaky-sounding DCOS Moscow asking for updates, but there were none: Neither COS nor Hannah had returned to the embassy; both were now seriously overdue. No news about DIVA. Schindler had prevailed on the consul general to make inquiries with the Russian Foreign Ministry concerning the missing diplomats, but there had been no response.

It had been rough lately for Nate Nash—he was turning the mental pages of an enormous photo album with “This Is Your Seriously Fucked-Up Life” embossed on the cover: He had lost LYRIC (through no fault of his own, but the agent was still lost); his bifurcated lover/agent relationship with Dominika was demented; he had slept with Hannah Archer, the case-officer colleague now missing in Moscow; DIVA had announced her suicidal intention to exfiltrate LYRIC from Russia’s Baltic coast despite the fact that the latter was under house arrest for suspicion of espionage; he had been designated by Benford to take charge of an as-yet-unspecified operation to somehow prevent an unidentified mole inside CIA from passing DIVA’s identity to the SVR
rezident
in Washington, a grandmotherly necromancer who appeared to be unbeatable on the street; and his Athens DCOS Marty Gable had asked him to reserve some time for a protracted counseling session when Nate returned to Station to discuss his lack of professionalism, his disregard for instructions, and, in Gable’s words, his being “a dumbassador from the Republic of Stupid.”