The Fall of Moscow Station (33 page)

“They tried to kill our teams,” Sokolov noted.

“I don't think so,” the soldier replied. “The napalm jars were left in plain view where the teams would see them immediately. Whoever arranged this could have set up a very efficient ignition system, but just left them sitting in the middle of the room for the heat to ignite. They were not even covered in accelerant, if our men's observations are accurate. I think that our arsonist wanted to give our men a chance to get out.” He scanned the ruins. “I have never heard of the CIA rigging a house to burn this way, but I suppose they might have done so in desperation. The general gave them little time to leave the country. They may have hoped to return one day, but left the incendiaries in case that proved impossible.”

Sokolov nodded. “I suspect that you are right. Still, it would be a callous thing. Had we not come, some civilian would have in time and might been killed, delayed napalm bombs notwithstanding.”
But if they knew we were coming? That we would be the ones to encounter those homemade explosives? It would not be callous then, would it?
He looked around at the remains of the living room, what had been a vaulted ceiling, plush carpet, and leather couches. “It surely was a lovely home. The Americans do like their comforts, do they not?”

“They do, I think,” the soldier agreed.

“Indeed,” Sokolov replied. “Sweep the rubble again. Look for any secret compartments. Tear out any floorboards you find intact. I doubt very much that you will find anything, but we must be thorough. Report to me by nineteen hundred hours tonight. General Lavrov will be expecting an update.” Sokolov frowned, then sighed. “And I must disappoint him.” The soldier nodded, saluted his commanding officer, then moved off to organize the sifting of the ash and char.

He pulled out his own encrypted smartphone and dialed a stored number. “General Lavrov, this is Colonel Sokolov.”

“Your report, Colonel?” Lavrov demanded.

“My teams have all reported in. We have taken control of all of the sites on the list you provided, but found them all abandoned. All but one had sensitive equipment either removed or rendered unusable. There is evidence enough to confirm that they likely were CIA safe houses, but there will be little of use to be recovered from any of them.”

“All but one?”

“The last one. The doors were all reinforced with strong metal and we were forced to breach the doors with explosive charges. There were incendiary traps set at the entrances, which our charges ignited. The house burned.”

“That is where she was hiding,” Lavrov noted.

“Almost certainly,” Sokolov agreed. “But she was not here when we arrived and she has no safe haven now, if your source's list is complete.”

“I do not think that worries her,” Lavrov replied. “She did not have to burn the house, but chose to do so. That was a message and a dramatic one. She is confident that she can escape our country. Your team's surveillance of the Western embassies has suffered no lapses?”

“None, General. She has not been observed entering or exiting the U.S. Embassy or that of any close American ally,” Sokolov confirmed. “It is always possible that she could have entered hidden in some vehicle, as we cannot search those. But we have kept a very tight watch on all pedestrians entering on foot.”

“Good. Make sure that they remain under watch. I want her found.”

“We may yet hope there will be some bit of evidence here missed in the initial sweep.”

“Hope is a poor substitute for competence, Colonel, if you understand my meaning,” Lavrov advised.

“I do, General,” Sokolov replied. “I will report to you with our findings by nightfall.”

“I will be waiting.” The call went dead. Sokolov replaced his phone in his pocket.
So, young lady, you got out
, he thought.
Run, little rabbit. I do not think you would like to be Lavrov's guest.

Moscow, Russia

Joshua Ettleman shifted his laptop bag in his hand, nervous about the contents for several reasons, some of which he would have been hard-pressed to put into words.

Espionage was not something he'd ever aspired to practice, and the newest foreign service officer at the U.S. Embassy was quite disturbed that he'd managed to get roped into an operation four months into his tour, however minor his role. But the order, polite though it was, had come from the ambassador. Why she had chosen him, Ettleman was sure he didn't know. He'd been quite surprised that his country's chief diplomat to the Russian Federation had agreed to participate in any operation the CIA had organized and he assumed it had something to do with the mass exodus of U.S. citizens from the country a few days before. He'd heard the scuttlebutt that the Russians had declared a huge swath of his countrymen persona non grata, but the ambassador had locked down the information on orders from Foggy Bottom. Ettleman and the minions who worked at his level were left only with the rumors, but that was plenty. Bureaucratic leaks often turned out to be more accurate than the exalted leadership would have liked and what Ettleman had heard was so strange that it fell squarely into that category of events that no one could have made it up from whole cloth.

As for the request that he perform an operational act, few moments of thought had given him the time to grasp just how few people in the U.S. government could even make such a request of honest diplomats. Someone with serious pull at a very high level was desperate enough to ask the State Department to take on a job that the spooks from Langley usually performed. Ettleman thought the order had to have come from the secretary of state at least, which suggested the National Security Council was involved or possibly the president himself. In fact, he was sure that CIA's leadership must have been galled at the thought of asking a diplomat to help; that they had was surely a sign of how desperate they'd become.

They were CIA, all of them.
It had to be true, and if it was, the CIA station in Moscow had been gutted, maybe down to the last officer. How that could have happened, the State officer had no idea, and his clique at work had posited one theory after another, each more insane than the last. If even the least improbable of them was true, the Russian government had done tremendous damage to his country's national security.

Ettleman was no spy, had no particular love for the CIA, but he considered himself ambitious, and if the Agency's fat was that deep in the fire, he didn't need long to figure that agreeing to perform this single duty would earn him the favor of someone very, very senior. Still, there was the small issue of completing the operational act without getting caught, and he couldn't imagine why he'd been chosen. The young man had met the U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation exactly once and that had been the perfunctory greeting that all new embassy staff received during their orientation on their first day at the diplomatic outpost. Now he'd been called in and asked to take this assignment that was far out of his lane. It seemed simple enough. He was to take a bag home, acting entirely normal on the walk, and deliver it to a CIA officer who would meet him there. He wasn't to open the bag under any circumstances, but he wasn't to resist if he was detained by the host country's security services. Ettleman had agreed on the single condition that the ambassador never, ever make any such request of him again. The young diplomat was willing to take his chances once in the pursuit of a commendation that would guarantee his next promotion and choice of assignments, but had no desire to see the interior of Lubyanka or risk eviction more than once from the country for actions “inconsistent with his diplomatic status,” as the Russians would call it.

Taking the assignment had seemed like a smart move until he'd stepped outside the embassy gates with the nylon bag slung over his shoulder. He was just another diplomat going home, but all of his senses were heightened and he was sure that everyone around him knew that he was on a special mission, that even the most casual Russian pedestrian knew he was carrying something valuable. Serious anxiety set in once the embassy was out of sight and he was sufficiently agitated that a fellow commuter on the Moscow subway had asked him whether he was taken ill. The winter was coming on and Americans were not as hardy as the average Muscovite after all. Drink more vodka and buy a good hat, he was told. Even an American could get through a Russian winter with one of the latter and enough of the former.

Once he was aboveground again, Ettleman wondered whether he was being followed, but the young diplomat had no training for detecting surveillance. He simply walked home, fighting the urge to hurry his pace, but it was like his body was fighting him, trying to break out into a dead run. The fight-or-flight urge was strong and it took all of his self-control to keep it checked.

Reaching the top floor of his apartment building, Ettleman scanned the concrete landing to his small apartment three times to make sure he was alone. The amount of adrenaline flooding his system was truly impressive and he hated what it was doing to his senses.
Langley morons
, he muttered inside his head.
Get themselves all evicted and now they need us to do their job and just maybe I get evicted too.

He set the nylon bag on the floor by his feet, leaning it against his leg so he could be sure it wouldn't move while he fished the key out of his pocket. There was no one anywhere nearby that he could tell, but Ettleman found his mind was running through every worst case it could conjure. At the moment, he was sure that the Russian FSB had some world-class sprinter racing up the stairs to grab the nylon bag. But there were no sounds other than his own heavy breathing and the clinking of his key against the door as his shaking hand failed to get it into the lock until his fourth attempt.

The door opened, Ettleman retrieved the bag and stepped inside, trying and failing to look casual. He was a poor actor and he knew it, but the door was closed within a few moments, locked and bolted. The need for pretense gone, the young man felt a small bit of his anxiety subside—

“Joshua Ettleman?” the voice asked. The diplomat yelped and spun around, scrambling for anything he could use as a weapon and scanning the room in a wild panic, his heart now pounding hard enough that he could feel the blood running behind his eyes. Nothing was within reach.

There was a young woman sitting on the couch. She was dressed in khakis, tactical pants, and low brown hiking boots, her dirty-blond hair pulled back away from her face. The woman was about his own age as best he could figure and quite pretty, he realized, after he was able to start thinking rationally again, which took several more seconds. She waited patiently until he could calm himself, as though she understood the irrational fear she'd inspired just by asking his name . . . but her accent was American, he realized. She was not a Russian, and therefore he had not been caught by the FSB.

“Who are you?” he demanded, the questions coming out far ruder than he'd intended.

The woman stood, blue jacket and khaki pants not hiding her curves very much. “You can call me Kyra,” she said, smiling. “They told me that you would be expecting me. I promise, I'm harmless.”

He noticed that she didn't explain who “they” were, and as for her being harmless, Ettleman doubted that very much. He tried to take some deep breaths, and it took a few seconds for the shock the adrenaline had given to his system to subside. “
They
told me that someone was going to meet me at my place,” he said. “They didn't say you were going to let yourself in. I thought my locks were better than that.” He regretted the stupid observation as soon as he said it.
She's CIA, moron. She knows how to pick a lock.

The woman shrugged. “Sorry, not so much. You know the Russians probably have already been in your apartment at least once, right?”

“I . . . State is supposed to install a security system, but they haven't gotten to it yet . . . you know, paperwork . . . our security office moves at the speed of government—”

Kyra smiled. “A security system won't help. The FSB isn't going to let a commercial system stop them if they want to come in here. I can show you some other ways you can figure out whether you've had an intruder, but you're not going to be able to keep them out. Don't worry, I swept the place, didn't find anything. Doesn't mean it's clean, but you probably haven't really come up on their radar yet.”

“I've only been here since July,” Ettleman stammered. His initial panic was gone, finally, and now he was finding himself anxious for another reason entirely. The young woman was the first visitor to his apartment and he was sure that he hadn't made much of an impression on her.

“I know,” Kyra said. She smiled.

“You do?”

“Your clothes are all American brands, suggesting that you haven't been in-country long enough to need to shop at any of the local stores for replacements,” she replied. “And I don't see any obviously Russian souvenirs. You have some very nice ones from Turkey and Argentina, nice enough to show you have decent taste. So the lack of anything local means this isn't your first overseas assignment, but you haven't been here long enough to pick up anything you think is worth showing off to visitors. And there was that lack of a security system.”

“Oh,” Ettleman said.

“Sorry, but that's probably why they picked you,” she told him. “They needed someone who the locals probably figured was an unlikely candidate to act as a courier.”

Ettleman was silent for a moment while he absorbed her admission. “And someone dispensable if they got caught.” He cursed himself.
The ambassador picked me because I'm nobody.

The woman looked at him, as though she could divine his thoughts from the look on his face. “Have you read Churchill?”

“Winston Churchill?”