Chapter 33
Alice
“Alice, why don’t you back away from the ledge and join us in the living room?” the woman said calmly.
Alice slowly turned. The woman looked older than her voice suggested—maybe sixty—with a sharp gray bob. Not Tania Garrett. A gun was lowered by her side. Something about her mouth, the way the deep creases on either side gave it an elongated appearance…
“Omigod, you’re Carter’s mom?”
“For my sins.” She jerked her head in the direction of the living room, making it evident that Alice was to follow. “Florence Beck.”
Florence seemed to make a point of stepping over Alice’s barely-there underwear, which was strewn on the floor beside Carter’s backpack and the boxers that Alice had stripped off him last night—with her teeth.
Not the classiest introduction to the woman whose son you were sleeping with.
Had slept with—Alice guessed that pleasant interlude in her life was over.
“Is Yuri okay?” Alice said, hurrying to catch up. “Yuri?” she called.
“I am okay except for pistol aimed at me.”
“He’s on our side,” Alice said, breathlessly, following Carter’s mom to the living room, where a curvy, black-haired woman around Florence’s age had him at gunpoint, his hands up. His own weapon was on the floor. “This is Yuri, Nika’s ex.”
Florence holstered her gun. “He is who, now?”
“Oh, such a long story, but it’d be great if you didn’t shoot him.”
Yuri slowly shifted his gaze from the gun and onto Florence. “What happened to my friend, in van outside?”
“Oh, we waved at him on the way in. Just two harmless little old ladies bringing home their shopping! Works every time. Rashida, safe to stand down.”
The other woman lowered her gun and went to shut the apartment door.
“The ring!” Alice said, looking at the tracker on her finger. “That’s how you found us?”
“It’s linked to my phone, like all of Carter’s surveillance equipment. Of course, I thought I was tracking Carter here. He was on a call to me when the Feds sprang him. He didn’t get away then?”
“He was taken by FBI,” Yuri said, warily lowering his hands.
“That would explain why someone tried to hack into his phone—Rashida had to turn it to zombie mode. Now Alice, you’d better fill me in, and fast.”
Alice gave a rundown while Yuri resumed looking through the documents. Rashida pulled her own laptop out of a sunflower-decorated shopping tote and sat beside him. She began cross-checking the names on the list and documents with some official-looking database, talking quietly with Yuri.
When Alice finished her update—which took a long time even though she skipped over the intimate details—Florence turned her attention to Rashida. “What’s it look like, hon?”
“Yeah, these documents seem to align with the names on the list. Though it’ll take several analysts weeks to truly get to the bottom of it all, and even then, that would be just the beginning.
The kind of investigation that could take years.
Now, Tania Garrett’s name isn’t coming up anywhere, in English or Russian, but there is a person with a codename of ‘The Leopard’ who seems to be spearheading the thing.
Gotta be a coordinated, long-term campaign—some of these documents are ten years old. ”
Yuri tapped the computer screen. “I think these were collected by FSB, for blackmail and bribery. So all these people betray America? Big, if true.”
“No wonder we’ve been at the mercy of Russia for so long,” Florence said, leaning over Yuri, a hand on the back of his chair. “Looks like they’ve infiltrated us at all sorts of levels.”
Alice leaned on the doorframe that separated the living room and the bedroom.
“So maybe Nika had this stuff when she went to see the station chief, and planned to hand it over in exchange for repatriation, but then the guy was killed right in front of her, and she grabbed the passport and travel documents and things, and quickly changed plans.”
Florence picked up the plastic-enclosed list. “One of the names here—Benjamin Schneider. He interrogated Carter when they arrived in the U.S. We can assume he also interrogated Nika. Rashida, we’d better find out if he’s anywhere near Carter now. Who do we trust in the FBI?”
“You think Nika told him what she had on him and blackmailed him?” Alice said.
“Possibly. Along with the deputy director of the CIA. And there were a dozen others with an interest in keeping all this from getting out. She obviously played it all very smartly. Carter said a large amount of money had landed in her account just before she arrived in the U.S. Could have been from anyone along the chain.”
“Nika said on tape—the one Carter translated—that she had a meeting with Tatiana—Tania—in Moscow. A tense meeting. Maybe that’s where the money came from.”
“Sounds like she had everyone wrapped up, and terrified about what she’d do with the intel. It’s crazy that she didn’t have all this better secured.”
“She wasn’t very trusting,” Alice said. “Maybe she thought it was better off in her shoes than stored electronically. If any of it got out, plenty of people would be coming after her. And then, when she knew her cancer was terminal, she wrote the book to set the record straight, clear her conscience?”
“While keeping all this hidden?” Florence said, indicating a document that Yuri was scrolling through.
“I wonder if she’d planned to do more, but the illness picked up speed. She became so frantic near the end. She said in her last days that she needed to get something to Carter. Well—I assume now she was talking about Carter.”
Yuri’s phone rang, making them all jump. “Is my friend from Moscow,” he said, and answered it in Russian.
Alice and the two older women fell silent while Yuri spoke, their heads bowed as if they were trying to figure out what he was saying. As he listened, he went to the laptop and accessed his email.
“Okay,” he said, hanging up. “There is one SD card left behind at shop. It showed up after Nika disappeared. It has one thing on it—a video. My friend has sent me. I will play.”
Alice could hardly breathe as they gathered to watch. It was security camera footage of a snowy residential city street.
“The street sign there.” Yuri pointed. “It is same style as Moscow. Nika’s shoemaker friend said Nika came to her one day in hurry, very worried, and got her to make new shoes she could hide things in, and she drilled hole into boot she was already wearing.
She said she made one new pair too big, but they ran out of time to fix. ”
“That’s where she hid the list,” Alice said.
“Nika also asked to borrow a bag and clothes, but she would not say why. She gave friend big hug and left. This was dropped off next day.”
On the video, a man appeared, strolling along the pavement.
“That’s the station chief,” Florence said, “the one who was killed.”
He jogged up several steps to an apartment, kicking snow from them with his shoe, removed a key from his pocket, and let himself in.
Florence groaned. “This is the footage that Carter was shown when he was interrogated. He told me it shows Nika arriving, and then leaving again some time later, in a panic. It’s not going to be any use to us—the FBI’s already got it.”
They watched for a few minutes, but the street remained empty. Yuri sped up the playback, slowing it whenever someone came into shot. All false alarms until a woman appeared, hunkered down, walking quickly.
“Nika,” Yuri said. He lightly touched the figure on the screen. She looked up, seemingly reading the house numbers, and then took the steps up to the door and rang the bell. It swung inward, and she disappeared from view. “I will speed up again.”
They watched in silence, a heaviness settling into Alice’s chest. Every time it felt like they were getting somewhere, they seemed to slip back. Rashida pulled her laptop toward her and resumed cross-checking names.
“So what will we do?” Alice said. “Take what we have to the authorities? Let them start digging?”
Florence straightened. “My concern is that some of the people named in these documents are deciding Carter’s fate, as we speak.
If the level of infiltration is as bad as these documents suggest, then what’s going to happen to him, and to all this?
I mean, we have plenty of dirt on them, but there’s nothing to prove that it was related to selling secrets to the Russians, or anything like that.
But yes, right now we don’t have a hell of a lot of options.
You all have done well to get this much. ”
“What if we confronted Tania? Is that just impossibly naive?”
“The likes of her wouldn’t give anything away. If what you say is true, and she is a sleeper agent, her whole life is a well-practiced lie. The greatest interrogator in CIA history—the woman who owns this apartment, incidentally—wouldn’t be able to break her.”
“Hey, look,” Yuri said, stopping the playback, and rewinding. “Watch this.” As he pressed play, a dark car pulled up on the street and two men got out. “I know one of those guys. He is FSB enforcer. He came after me.”
The men walked up to the apartment. One turned around to keep watch while the other picked the lock, and they disappeared inside. Alice covered her mouth with her palm. No one said a word as they watched the now-empty street on the silent screen.
“Here they come,” Yuri said as the men emerged. They pulled the door closed, returned to their car and drove away. Yuri fast-forwarded again, his hand noticeably trembling. “And here she comes. So scared. Poor Nika.”
“Surely this exonerates Carter?” Alice said. “Do you think the footage he was shown was manipulated?”
“Easily done,” Florence said.
“Flo,” Rashida said, darkly, pointing to her laptop screen.
“I found Tyler Wade. He’s now a security guard at the D.C.
field office. He was questioned over the deaths of two suspects in FBI custody, a while back, including a Russian national who was a suspected sleeper agent.
They were both ruled suicides and he was exonerated. ”
“Is that where they’ll have taken Carter?” Alice said.
“Rashida, get on the phone to Li Mei. Time to get that stubborn son of mine lawyered up, whether he wants to or not.”
Yuri’s phone rang again. He answered, listened for a second, and abruptly stood, his chair clattering to the floor behind him. “People are coming up the stairs,” he announced, picking his gun up off the floor. “Both sides of building. Not FBI. They are armed.”
Alice stood frozen for a few seconds, as Florence snapped orders to the others. Then she grabbed Carter’s laptop and the list and ran into the bedroom. This time she would be ready.