Fidelity (10 page)

19

S
IX GIRLS
raised pink-colored cocktails in the air to match Kay's—more people than she would have imagined celebrating the anniversary of her birth into this benighted world, particularly as this was an occasion to which Kay herself did not attach any great importance. She laughed and sipped her drink through a smile that was about half genuine.

It was Kay's first night out in a month, and she wouldn't have had any trouble extending her isolationist streak, and quite frankly would have been fine spending her twenty-ninth birthday at home catching up on work. But Alice had been her friend since they were gawky, acne-ridden middle-schoolers sneaking cigarettes in the bathroom of their expensive prep school, and she had an app on her phone that told her anytime anyone was having a birthday. So she had called Kay the week before and all but demanded that she come out for a few congratulatory drinks, and Kay found herself unable to say no.

Which was what they were doing then, in a portion of Manhattan where a slice of pizza cost eight dollars and an alcoholic drink a grim fifteen. The last time Kay had been out celebrating something, it was her transfer out of Baltimore, and she could not imagine two less similar bars than Monaghan's, with its chipped tables and surly staff and cheap booze, and the half
club that she was now occupying, which looked like someone's idea of a bondage dungeon: dim lighting and very loud music and a dance floor packed with what seemed exclusively lingerie models. For that matter she did not see many clear points of comparison between her Baltimore colleagues, hardened professionals, and her old friends, smiling, bright-eyed examples of bourgeois youth.

“Old friends” might be stretching the point a bit, Kay had to admit. They weren't bad. It wasn't their fault. Fair enough, Sandra's hemline would have been risqué had she been a dancer in the Moulin Rouge, and Anna had, since they had seen each other frequently back in high school, picked up the unfortunate habit of beginning every single sentence with the word “I.” But that was about the worst you could say about any of them, and in the grand scheme of things these were far from cardinal sins.

No, Kay could admit it: the problem wasn't her sort-of friends, who were basically good-humored and who seemed to sincerely wish her well. It was Kay herself. It was Kay having just endured a week of digging through strangers' trash, trying to separate minor errors from outright evil, a week that seemed uncannily like the week before, and the week before that, and would almost certainly seem like next week as well. It had left her feeling rather nasty about the world and the species of bipeds that had come to rule it.

It was not an easy thing to turn off. The guy at the bar who had offered to buy her a drink, tall and dark and handsome and obviously,
obviously
married, rubbing the naked skin of his ring finger as if it were a good luck charm. In the back corner two girls were in the midst of some sort of a drug deal, probably ecstasy, although Kay wasn't certain; and, OK, it wasn't like she was going to run over and bust them, but for Christ's sake maybe show a little bit of discretion.

No, once you stepped into that labyrinth of mirrors, it became hard to leave it, hard to know if you'd left it. That fellow sitting quietly at the counter, nursing a vodka—had she seen him before, maybe somewhere in her neighborhood? And was he looking at her a bit too frequently, too frequently and too intently?

“Kay? Kay? Are you even listening?” Alice asked.

Kay turned swiftly from her paranoia to the woman who had been her best friend through much of the formative portion of her life. “Sorry, Alice—I'm a little bit distracted.”

“I asked why you didn't invite any of your coworkers.”

Kay stifled a laugh at the image of Jeffries out with the group of them, Jeffries having a casual drink, Jeffries flirting with someone at the bar, Jeffries relaxing her raptor eyes for a single solitary second. Marshall and Wilson were fine—she'd started to enjoy their company if not quite the way she had with Torres—but they had families to go home to, and had worked through as long a week as Kay had, or nearly, and she hadn't supposed any of them would be inclined to get drunk on sugary cocktails.

Kay shook her head. “I've got everyone I want right here!” she said, feigning an enthusiasm she didn't actually feel.

“Really, sister?” a voice from behind her asked. “You can't think of anyone you'd like to see?”

Alice gave that high-pitched squeal, and then she was up from her chair and taking Kay's brother in an embrace that some might have thought platonic, except that she had one hand on his ass and the kiss she gave him crossed over that undefinable boundary between cheek and neck. Alice had been carrying a torch for Kay's brother for the better part of twenty years, and Christopher's manifest disinterest as well as his lack of success since leaving high school had done nothing to extinguish it.

Christopher handled it with that grace that had always come naturally to him, that charm that was at once his most prized asset and the seed of his downfall, then spread it amongst the rest of Kay's friends, winning converts left and right. Alice and Sandra would be ready to kill each other by the end of the evening in an attempt to get her brother's attention. After all these years they still didn't understand that he couldn't keep himself focused on any one thing for any length of time.

But damn if he didn't look good in his tight jeans and black leather jacket and with his eyes that seemed not to give a damn about anything. And he was carrying a bright pink teddy bear which was the size of an overweight adolescent.

“What are you doing with that?” Kay asked.

“I went to Coney Island today,” he said.

“One of the upsides of not having a real job.”

“Absolutely. Anyway, I won it with my shooting ability.”

“And what would I use that pink bear for, Christopher?”

“You could take it somewhere and use it for target practice.”

Kay laughed and grabbed Christopher and pulled him into a hug, and he laughed and returned it.

“What the hell is wrong with you girls?” Christopher said, pushing her aside for the moment. “An hour into her birthday and my sister is still sober? No one's going to call you in to investigate a bank heist tonight, Kay,” he said, signaling to the bartender, who brought over two shots of whiskey. “Tonight you're just one more sinner in a world full of them. So enjoy yourself.”

“That's not my strong suit.”

Christopher raised his glass. “Fear not, dear sister: your wiser elder brother is here to teach you.”

Kay laughed and took the shot.

Christopher was a source of never-ending concern for Kay; kept her up long after her bedtime; wore lines into her face and
into her heart. He could not be trusted to show up for interviews on time, to help her move, to act appropriately at family gatherings. His debts had just about risen into the five-figure range. He had more than a casual relationship with narcotics. He was selfish and reckless and foolish . . . but damn if he wasn't good for a laugh.

20

J
EFFRIES CALLED
Kay into her office one early fall ­afternoon, asked her to take a seat, then looked at her for a long while without saying anything. Kay knew better than to break the silence: Jeffries did not waste time with banter. She would speak when she was ready to, and not before.

“You've been up here several months now, Agent Malloy,” she began finally.

It wasn't quite a question, but Kay answered anyway. “Yes, ma'am.” Kay had fallen into a comfortable groove since her debriefing with Jeffries a month earlier. Her days were busy but productive, and she had started to feel she had transitioned out of her breaking-in period and was no longer figuring out the ropes so much as actively contributing to ongoing investigations. She had a better appreciation for the twilight world of counterintelligence, the feints and the trickery, the endless hidden motivations.

“How are you feeling about it?”

How to answer that question without sounding incompetent or immodest? “I'm doing my very best,” Kay said, matching her superior's formality.

Jeffries grunted and looked down at the file on her desk.
“I suppose you've already figured that there's something in the offing,” she said.

That morning Kay had spent several hours taking a polygraph test, being asked innumerable questions about her work, the polygrapher in charge of giving it tracking her heartbeat, pulse and respiration to make sure that she wasn't offering any false answers. The polygraph was a key tool in the counterintelligence arsenal, useful in ferreting out falsehoods. But it was a long way from perfect, which was part of the reason its results were not considered valid in the U.S. legal system or those of most Western countries. It could offer false positives, suggesting dishonesty where there actually was none. More important, it could be beaten, especially by those who had been trained to do so. The number of double agents who had managed to survive its stress without breaking was not insignificant. Indeed, the polygraph was something of a double-edged sword: it caught the vast majority of people who attempted to lie their way through it, but those who escaped the net were inevitably the most devious and dangerous and showed no deception on their polygraphs. Aldrich Ames, the CIA Case Officer who had been doubled by the KGB during the 1980s and remained undetected for years, had passed a polygraph test, laughing and lying through his teeth.

Although how exactly he had done so, Kay could not possibly say: she spent the entire test feeling nervous as all hell, and she hadn't even done anything. But it ended eventually with the polygrapher thanking her for her time and shuffling her out, and Kay assumed that she had done all right, otherwise she wouldn't be having this conversation with Jeffries.

“I had a hint of it,” Kay said, trying unsuccessfully to match Jeffries's deadpan demeanor.

“HQ has assigned us a major case,” Jeffries said simply.

Kay couldn't think of anything worth adding, so she remained silent.

“Looking into the identity of a possible CIA mole who's been wreaking havoc with their Russian spy networks.” Jeffries said it like she was reciting a shopping list or informing Kay about some trivial bit of protocol, but to Kay it sounded enormously exciting. “I've been asked to put together a group of Agents with unimpeachable records and a hunger for the mission. I think you'd be a good addition to the squad. It'll be a full-time assignment. We'll have to take you off all of your current investigations. And the work won't be easy, and it might not get wrapped up anytime soon.” There was a long and, to Kay's mind, rather dramatic pause while Jeffries stared out the window at the city below, drumming her fingers aimlessly on her desk. Just at the point when Kay thought she was going to burst from the tension, Jeffries turned back to her and said, “That is, if you think you're ready for it.”

It was not a rhetorical question. A challenge was being put in front of her; it was up to Kay to decide if she would accept it. What if she decided she wasn't ready? Would she have a chance to return to criminal investigations, work she knew herself to be skilled at, and that she had enjoyed?

The mission came first: if this was what was required of her, then Kay would not back down now. “I believe I am,” Kay said.

Jeffries nodded. “Welcome to Black Bear, Agent Malloy,” she said. “Our first meeting is Monday morning down in Washington. Come ready to work.”

21

T
HE FIRST
meeting of the Black Bear investigation began at nine thirty sharp on a rainy autumn Monday in an unattractive side office in FBIHQ. In addition to Kay, Jeffries had selected Marshall and Wilson as part of her team of specialists, as well as a half dozen other Agents with whom Kay was less familiar but whose competence she had no reason to doubt. They had arranged themselves—perhaps deliberately, perhaps not—along one end of a long conference table. At the other sat two members of their sister agency, looking neat and serious and not altogether friendly.

One of them was Kay's age or a bit older, with skin the color of cocoa, handsome in an unassuming way, neatly but not expensively dressed. He had eyes of indeterminate hue and wore a soft smile like he knew something that you most likely did not. He had introduced himself as Andrew when she had walked in, giving each member of the team a friendly handshake, then sat back down and returned to his attitude of quiet observation.

“Don't bother asking for his last name,” Jeffries had told Kay before the meeting, when the two of them were alone in the office. “He won't tell you, and if he did tell you it wouldn't be a real one. For that matter his first name will probably be an alias too. Also, virtually everything else that he tells us will be a cover.”

“Everything?”

Jeffries shrugged, stood, slipped on her suit jacket. “Best to assume so. The Bureau trains you to investigate crimes, Kay. The Agency teaches them to lie. Remember to keep the ball in our court.”

But as they walked out, Kay doubted there was much that anyone on the face of the earth could teach Jeffries about duplicity.

The older and senior of the two Agency men, Group Chief Mike Anthony, looked like the image of an intelligence officer you would have read about in John le Carré's novels. He was short and running towards fat, and he had thick owlish glasses and dark, penetrating gray eyes. He spoke slowly and evenly, as if every sentence were an elaborate algebraic equation that he was doing, neatly and with great competence, inside his head. He began the meeting with such little fanfare that it took Kay half a sentence before she noticed. “I'd like to start by thanking ASAC Jeffries, the rest of you, and the Bureau generally for . . . coming in and helping us out on this one.”

The first story of the day, and the coffee was still warm. If there was one thing the CIA did not like, it was oversight. Oversight to the CIA was like garlic to a vampire, milk to the lactose intolerant, a razor blade to a hemophiliac. CIA case officers were like mushrooms, Marshall had joked with her earlier: they grew best in the dark. For that matter, there was no great love lost between the two organizations. They had the same rivalry as you could find anytime two organizations performed similar tasks, competing for funding and attention from the government. For the CIA to be approaching the FBI for help meant that things at their sister agency had gotten very grim, very grim indeed.

“Happy to help,” Jeffries said flatly. Jeffries had many strengths, but a knack for pleasantries was not one of them. She would have been a very bad telemarketer.

“Recently we've lost several RIPs within the Russian heartland and we think it's time to take a good internal look,” Mike Anthony said.

Looking around, Kay did not think that anyone seemed particularly shocked. The end of the Cold War had seen, happily for the planet Earth, a distinct downward tick in the likelihood of the United States and Russia fighting a tank war or, for that matter, a full-scale nuclear apocalypse. But neither had the intelligence services of the two countries shaken hands, packed up their radio transmitters, and headed home. Like every other major power in the world and most of the smaller ones, the United States was actively working to infiltrate the security services of modern Russia. The Russians, needless to say, were not slow to return the compliment. The KGB had changed their name to the SVR, but apart from that it remained essentially the same. The CIA had not bothered with a shift in nomenclature or in tactics, and in effect the low-grade conflict between the two countries continued unabated. It was, like Jeffries had said, a game that doesn't end, a chess match without a permanent victor, successes followed by reverses, but hopefully with a few more in the win column.

“This was Mikhail Valenko,” Anthony said, and the large video screen over his shoulder shifted to display a grainy image of a man in his mid-fifties, eyes heavy, nose red from drink. “Born 1962 in
Petrograd. At one point he was a top electronics man in the SVR technical service. At another, more recent point he was one of our top RIPs.

“This was Vladimir Dolstoi,” Anthony continued, clicking a button on his computer, the screen shifting to show another man, slightly younger but otherwise more or less identical to the first. “Military background, moved into the SVR shortly after the end
of the Cold War. Doubled him a few years back, after he got into some trouble in Berlin.

“This was Dmitri Ulyanov.”Another click, another dowdy-looking Slav. “Worked counterintelligence for the SVR. Until recently, at least.”

It seemed the show-and-tell portion of the meeting was over. Anthony sat back down in his chair and took a deep breath as if preparing himself for an unpleasant task ahead. “These three men represented the Agency's deepest penetration into the SVR, which is to say Mother Russia. They represented, on my part, personally, many thousands of hours of effort over a dozen years.”

“And?” Jeffries asked quietly.

“And each one of them is now a corpse in some unhappy tundra grave. They have been rolled up. Dispatched. Disappeared. Fifteen years we have groomed these RIPs, and in less than six months every one of them was identified, tried and executed for treason. No doubt their final days were . . . unpleasant.” No doubt. If the aims of the CIA and SVR were roughly similar, their tactics differed significantly. If caught, the Black Bear mole could count on spending the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary, but at least he wouldn't have to worry about spending any time being tortured in some subbasement at Langley.

Anthony pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “The loss of one RIP could be explained as incompetence or bad luck. The loss of two might, less plausibly, be the same. At this point, unfortunately, we are left with one inescapable but unpleasant reality: the SVR has picked off our people because they have someone on our side pointing them out. We have a mole in our house,” he said simply.

Kay felt a wave of self-doubt creep over her. She took a long sip of coffee to process the information.

“And what do we know about this mystery man?” Marshall asked.

“Unfortunately, damn little,” Andrew said regretfully. They were the first words he had spoken since his greeting, and Kay was struck by the harmonious lilt of his voice. “We don't even know if there is only the one mole: it could be a number of people working in conjunction or separate recruits entirely, each offering the SVR just enough information to figure out who our people were.”

“Word is that Susan has a number of RIPs within the Russian consulate,” Mike Anthony answered.

There were long moments during meetings when, if you did not know Jeffries, you would think she was not paying attention at all—perhaps even that she had fallen asleep with her eyes open. Then she would make some casual aside in her too-soft voice, something that made it clear not only that she had missed nothing of what was said but indeed that she understood the subject better than anyone else in the room. “I'm afraid the identities of our RIPs are going to remain secret.”

“Come on, Susan, how about a little bit of interagency trust?”

“I trust you fine, Mike,” Jeffries said. “I just don't trust everyone working for you. And since I can't trust everyone who works for you, I can't trust anyone who works for you. Which means we're going to keep our cards inside our vest.”

Anthony shrugged. Jeffries worked counterintelligence: it was a matter of principle and habit to play things close, and he couldn't have expected the Assistant Special Agent in Charge to suddenly break protocol. But then, Anthony was a spy, and it was in his nature to ferret out secrets, and probably he couldn't quite help himself. “Fair enough,” he said. “But understand that at Langley this case has the attention of executive leadership. Any
thing that can be done, we'll do. Andrew here,” he said, nodding to his colleague, “will head to New York to act as liaison and to render whatever assistance he can. Needless to say, he'll have no contact with our office there: his existence, as well as that of the rest of the Black Bear squad, will remain unknown to anyone in the CIA besides myself and a few of my immediate superiors.”

Which made sense: it might very well turn out that their mole was operating out of the CIA's National Resource Office in New York, in which case it obviously wouldn't do to have any of them aware of Black Bear's existence or that Andrew was a part of it. They discussed a few other procedural matters and then the meeting broke up, Kay, Jeffries and the rest of the squad returning to another conference room.

“That was Mike Anthony,” Marshall said. “I thought he'd be taller.”

“He's a spy, not a basketball player,” Kay said.

“Still, a man with his history, you expect a little more to it.”

Kay had never heard of Mike Anthony before, but then, she was new to the world of counterintelligence. From what she gathered from her colleagues, in his own agency Anthony was held in a similar regard to that which Jeffries enjoyed internally: as a seasoned, old-school professional with more skeletons in his closet than a cut-rate embalmer. Relationships between the two agencies were often clouded by rivalry and distrust, but it seemed that Anthony's reputation had gone some way towards smoothing over such differences.

Feelings about Andrew, however, were rather more mixed. “The Agency couldn't have saddled us with anyone prettier?” Marshall grumbled, unhappy to discover that his dubious distinction of being the best-looking man in the office had come to an abrupt end.

“Word is he's a blue-flamer,” Wilson said. “Supposed to be very sharp; spent some time out east doing top-quality work.”

“That means we have to spend the rest of the investigation with him peeking over our shoulder?”

“We're all in it together,” Jeffries counseled them. “One mission, one fight. We will, of course, give . . . Andrew our fullest cooperation. Keep him up-to-date on any information we think would be of help to him.”

“So we ought to start turning over our RIPs? Just open up the company books and let the man peruse through?”

“Let's not exaggerate here, Agent Marshall,” Jeffries said. “Andrew gets our output and whatever might be relevant to Black Bear. He obviously is not in that privileged inner circle that gets to know where exactly we are receiving our information.” Protecting one's sources was one of the most basic elements of spycraft: information might be passed on to other intelligence partners, or to the political overseers, but where that information came from was a secret that a good Agent would be tortured without revealing.

“Lately we've been wondering why we keep you in it,” Wilson said to Marshall, who laughed and shrugged.

“We don't need to get into a turf war with the CIA over protocol,” said Jeffries, never one to let a moment of levity stretch out too long. “But let's not forget that they're here because they've got a leak they can't plug. Let's make absolutely sure that nothing that we're responsible for drains out through it. Beyond that, you don't need me to explain to you the seriousness of the situation. This mole is out there and he is very obviously quite active. We need to pick him up as soon as we can before he trades any more national secrets to the SVR.”

“What now?” Kay asked.

Marshall and Wilson looked at each other. “Now we're going to introduce you to the matrix, Kay. The two of you are going to get to be very, very close over the course of the next few months. Years. Decades.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“Depends on how you feel about drudgery,” Wilson said. “What can I tell you, Malloy? It's not fun but it's absolutely necessary.”