Chapter 19
Ivy’s apartment was on the third floor. It was a small but efficient and spotless townhouse.
She'd been home for an hour. Changed out of her work clothes into jeans and a Georgetown sweatshirt. Made tea. Green tea, loose leaf, in a small ceramic pot her mother had given her when she'd moved to DC.
The pot sat on the coffee table now, next to three manila folders she absolutely should not have taken out of the building.
The folders were from the Defense Intelligence Agency. Not CIA. Not Treasury. DIA maintained its own records on foreign weapons programs, separate from the CIA's intelligence assessments. Different focus and different access protocols.
And significantly less secure checkout procedures if you knew which clerk to ask and which forms to fill out at the end of a long Friday.
Ivy had known.
The folders sat there, innocuous and damning. She'd signed them out under a research request for Treasury's Financial Crimes division. Legitimate on paper. Completely unauthorized in practice.
If anyone checked, she'd be in very hot water.
She opened the first folder.
The apartment was quiet. No television. No music. Just the sound of pages turning and the occasional car passing on the street below.
A scroll painting hung on the wall above the couch—mountains and mist, done in ink wash. Her father's taste. The painting had been in his childhood home. Now it was in hers.
On the bookshelf, a small jade figurine. A scholar, seated, reading. Her mother had given it to her for college graduation. "For wisdom," she'd said. "And patience."
Ivy could use both right now.
She worked through the first folder methodically. The second folder went faster. Finally, she reached the last file, which was thinner than the other two.
More recent, too. A summary report on Soviet personnel who had disappeared, defected, or died under suspicious circumstances in the previous two years.
Ivy read slowly.
Nearly an hour later, she closed the folder. Checked her watch. Nearly midnight.
Joe was in Michigan. Probably asleep by now.
She needed to tell him as soon as possible.
She picked up her pager from the coffee table. A small black Motorola, standard government issue. She'd had Joe's number programmed in since he'd given it to her six months ago.
She typed in a code: 489.
On this type of pager, you had to use the number keys. I was the fourth key. V was the eighth. Y was the ninth.
489 = IVY.
She hit send.
Then she waited.
Joe had been driving for three hours.
The Upper Peninsula was dark and empty. The snow had stopped an hour ago but the roads were still bad. Ice underneath, powder on top. The truck handled it fine but Joe kept his speed down. No point getting there fast if he ended up in a ditch.
He'd seen maybe five other vehicles since leaving the hotel. Two semis. A sheriff's cruiser. A pickup truck with a plow blade. One sedan with out-of-state plates, driving too fast, fishtailing slightly.
No gas stations. No rest stops. Nothing but trees and darkness and the occasional road sign promising a town that never seemed to arrive.
His pager went off.
The vibration was sharp against his hip. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen.
489.
Ivy.
She wouldn't page him at midnight unless it was important. And she wouldn't use their code unless it was something she couldn't say over a regular line.
He needed a phone.
He drove for another twenty minutes before he saw lights. A gas station, finally. Small. Old. The kind that still had mechanical pumps and a handwritten sign advertising night crawlers and live bait.
Joe pulled in. The lot was empty except for one other vehicle—a rusted Bronco with a camper shell.
He parked and got out. The cold hit him immediately. It was the kind of chill that made your lungs hurt.
The payphone was mounted on the outside wall, under a flickering light. Joe fed in coins and dialed Ivy's number from memory.
She picked up on the first ring.
"Joe."
"Got your page," he said. "What's wrong?"
"I found something but there’s a lot of guesswork on my part."
Joe waited.
"I definitely think it’s a name," Ivy said. "Not a weapon or a location. A person."
"Who?"
"A Russian physicist. Dmitri Volkov. He disappeared sometime around 1987. Nobody’s seen him since."
Joe processed that. "Okay. What does that have to do with what I’m working on?"
"A guy like Volkov probably didn’t work at some random facility, Joe.”
The line was silent for a moment. Just static and the sound of their breathing.
Then Ivy spoke again, and her words landed like a hammer.
"He probably worked in their nuclear weapons program."