Red Warning, page 8
He had installed a few others, well hidden, around the house, though experienced surveillance crews would be aware of that and know to avoid straight sight lines from his residence.
While he went about his day-to-day—the long runs, the errands—he was dragging any tails in front of those cameras.
Sam pored over the footage, looking for any of the telltale signs of pursuit. Clothes could be swapped easily, so he focused on faces. Gaits were another giveaway. Only the most dedicated street operators could put on different postures and ways of carrying themselves.
Scrubbing through the video, he noted this student on a run, that homeless man heading down to the river park, each of them a possible watcher with his own seemingly natural routine. As he went, he captured clips of any suspects who were too regular, too focused.
He looked over them now, zeroing in on the eyes. He wondered if Konstantin would be so bold. From the way Konstantin had talked to him last night just before the bombing, Sam believed he’d been at the scene, watching. There was something personal about how he’d reached out, the hate in his voice. Sam could be staring at his face right now.
After another ten minutes, he closed the laptop and pushed back his chair. He had to stop him. He knew who he needed to call: Emily. She’d been close to the two NOCs who’d died and she was inside the Agency. She would be able to use its facial-recognition tech and, more important, she would have access to DEMETER.
16
Sam shut the door of his Jeep and walked down the gravel driveway to Emily’s house, perched at the edge of Scott’s Run Nature Preserve. The trees formed a canopy of pale green overhead, and the air dripped with humidity. These little valleys that fed into the Potomac felt like they were in the middle of nowhere, but he was only a couple of miles from CIA headquarters.
The house was a two-story Victorian, tiny by the McMansion standards of McLean, the surrounding town. He climbed the front porch and knocked. He and Emily had texted before he came by.
It took her a minute to answer the door. Her hair was still damp, and a shoulder bag sat in the front hall, clothes visible inside. She looked like she’d pulled an all-nighter at the office. That was fairly common. She would come home to shower and change, then head back to work. The Agency was well stocked with cots and everyone kept an eye mask in a desk drawer. There was nothing unusual about living out of the office for days or weeks when a crisis hit. Her group must have been mobilizing in response to the bombing, which meant they were searching for a Russian connection. The attack had been the lead story on all the news stations as he drove over, and speculation about the culprits—foreign terrorist, domestic militia, crazed loner—had gone into overdrive, but no one knew the truth.
The DEMETER file belonged to Russia House, the informal name for Emily’s group at the CIA. Sam always found it odd that HQs staffers used the nickname, since it came from a John le Carré novel in which, as always, the Americans were the duplicitous villains, and they were outwitted by an alcoholic amateur.
He had to be careful with her. She was already primed to distrust him, and he was skating dangerously close to the line here, looking for answers to a question posed by a Russian agent. Emily had been a good street officer, though she had been behind a desk for a long time now. Getting information without burning himself would be quite the dance.
“Come in,” she said. He entered and she shut the door behind him. She glanced at herself in the mirror and quickly fixed her hair as Sam walked into the foyer. He pretended not to notice, though the scent of jasmine he picked up as he passed her flooded him with a memory of their one night together.
She was carrying a zippered toiletries case that she dropped into the bag before she led him to the kitchen. “Sorry if I was a little prickly last night,” she said without looking back.
“It’s all good,” he said.
The house was all worn-in DC establishment inside: old hardbacks on shelves everywhere, with the hallmarks of generations of foreign service tossed in among them—jades and vases and a Japanese officer’s sword.
She asked Sam if he wanted something to drink. He was fine, he said, and she picked up her glass of water and led him onto the back porch. The smell of the woods was stronger there—damp earth and grass. Someone must have just mowed.
She went to the porch railing, rolled her shoulders back and stretched her neck, then turned around and rested against the rail.
“Feeling cooped up?” he asked.
“I’ve been at work from when I saw you last until now.” Intelligence offices didn’t have windows. They were like casinos—you never knew when the sun went down, and you might come out to find it was a new day and there was three feet of snow on the ground.
Sam looked over the garden. The dahlias were blooming, and near the shed, the squash was ready in raised beds. “How do you have time for all that?” he asked.
“Headlamp. Moonlight. Get up an hour or two earlier on the weekend. You can’t let the job be your whole life.” She peered down at the blooms. “Though I do like to pretend I’m snipping off my nemeses’ fingers as I prune.”
She faced him and took a sip of water. “You remember those cookouts you used to have? People actually having fun at a party in DC. It was a revelation. Gillespie, from NSC Europe, what did he end up singing?”
“‘Rock You Like a Hurricane.’ He was hilarious. I probably wouldn’t have given him all that punch if I’d known he was the director.”
“It was funny. Nobody ever asked ‘And what do you do?’ at your place,” she said, seemingly still in disbelief.
Sam saw where she was going. What happened to the guy who used to throw those parties? The job happened. A twenty-three-year-old bombing victim named Abby had just had her leg amputated at GW Hospital. Sam had called for an update that morning. But he kept that anger hidden now.
“Did you pick up any leads?” he asked.
She tilted her head to the side, her lips pursed.
Sam raised his hand. “I get it.” He took a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket and passed it to her. “Take a look at these guys. Maybe it’ll help.”
She opened it and scanned the page. They were Sam’s courier suspects, a list that included Christopher Dimos as well as a few Russian moneymen that Sam had his eye on. He wasn’t going to sit on good leads, not when the Agency was going full bore on this, and it might surface something on Dimos that could tell Sam whether or not to trust him.
“These are all associated with Gemini?” Emily asked.
“Yes. First- and second-order links.”
“And you think it connects to the bomber?”
“My theory.”
“And Geneva?”
He nodded slowly.
“If I find something, I can’t share it with you, Sam.”
“It’s not a trade, Emily. I want to help.”
The corners of her mouth curved up just slightly. “This is how you hook them, huh?” She shook her head. “All those sources. I’m not so easy, Sam.”
“Oh, I know.”
She drank some more water and looked out over the woods. “Why was Finlay there that night?”
That threw him for an instant.
“I need to know the truth,” she said. “Did you push him into going?”
“No. What do you think happened in Geneva?”
“I don’t know. He was impressionable. Gung ho. The young officers idolize you. You know your rep.”
“I don’t. Fill me in.”
“The cowboy stuff.”
“I didn’t ask for any of that. I don’t talk to anyone at HQs. I’m just out there doing the job.”
“I tried to warn him.”
“Against me?”
“I grew up around all of this. I’ve seen it before. Obsession. Losing perspective.”
“I’m that way?”
“You weren’t. I don’t know, Sam. But he would have followed you anywhere.”
“What did you hear?”
“You needed backup and couldn’t wait for headquarters. So you brought him in.”
“Because he wouldn’t know any better?” Sam looked down, his lip curling. He gripped the railing with his left hand. “Fin pushed me.”
She didn’t say a word, only watched him.
“He found out I was going, and he insisted.”
“How did he find out?”
“I don’t know. He was good. We were out that afternoon. He might have noticed I was nursing a drink or that I had a game-ready vibe going. He knew something was up, and he followed me out to my car.”
“You hadn’t planned to bring him?”
“I’d thought about it. He’d been in on a couple of early meetings, and I wanted him in on the big pitch, to learn. But I wasn’t going to risk it that night. Everything was moving too fast. I’m not sure how he figured out I was up to something, but it all just confirmed that he was ready. He was even messing with me about it, said it would be a shame if anybody found out I was running some off-books meetings.”
“He shook you down?”
“Not seriously. He wouldn’t do that. But I respected the grit. Reminded me of myself. It was his call, his idea. I did want him with me that night, for sure. If he hadn’t stood watch and sent up a flare, I might not have made it out, and we’d have no idea who was behind all this.”
She was concentrating, weighing what he’d said. He could see her fighting with her pride, wondering if she’d been wrong.
“He had your back.” Her fingers went to her necklace, a simple gold cross. “He was always that way.” She didn’t say anything for a moment, then went on. “You know he was honored that you gave him a shot with Alex Clarke.”
She held the cross between her thumb and index finger and looked down at it, the gold glinting in the sun.
“What’s that?” Sam asked, gesturing toward it.
“I never told you the story about this and Fin?”
“No.”
“It was my father’s. He wore it every day and left it to me after he passed. My senior year of high school, Fin and I were up at Sunday River for the ski races one weekend, hanging out with a bunch of friends crashing all over this condo. There were some college kids around too, total maniacs, drunk and high all weekend. My bag went missing. It was one of those Kate Spades that were big then. I really only cared about the necklace.
“A girl I was staying with told me that one of the college guys had taken it, this huge dude staying at the other complex. He pinched it for his girlfriend, I guess, just because he could, a power thing.
“Fin asked me about it. He could tell I was upset. And I think he was worried I was going to go get myself in trouble.”
She ran her finger across her glass, wiping aside the condensation.
“He took off without a word. A half hour later he was back with the bag in his hand, his knuckles all banged up, and his eye already going red.”
“He didn’t say anything?”
“Just that he had to skip the party that night.” She looked at Sam and squinted slightly, then went on with a Maine accent: “And that he was about three minutes ahead of a half dozen Colby lacrosse bros who were out for fakking blood.”
Sam let out a quiet laugh. The impression was dead-on.
“We got out of there. He took me to some diner he knew outside Oxford. Everything came in those red plastic baskets. We got burgers and then went home on the back roads, him driving, me picking CDs out of this old case he had.”
She smiled, then looked down and closed her eyes tight.
He took a step closer, put his hand to her elbow, watching her fight back the emotion.
“It’s all right, Emily.”
She bit her lip, nodded, and moved toward him. Sam put his arms around her.
She didn’t make a sound, her chest rising and falling against his. She lifted her chin and looked into his eyes, pressing against him. His hand rose to the back of her neck. After a moment she stepped away and gave him a smile as if they’d come this close to falling for an old trick.
“Why did we decide that . . .”
“I think you decided, Emily.”
“Right,” she said, and her eyes went down for a second, as if she were searching for the reason again.
“You never did tell me why.”
She didn’t respond but didn’t look away.
The day after they’d gotten together at his place, Sam was called to a crash meeting in Malta. He was out of contact for ten days, and when he came up for air, he reached out to her, but she was on the road too. He kept trying, but something had changed. After a few back-and-forths, it was clear enough that she didn’t want to pursue it and he respected that. Though he never did understand why. Maybe it was because that night was so intense and so comfortable, as if they’d already been together for years, and she wasn’t ready to make that leap. Maybe she didn’t like how he did things on his own and knew he’d be bad for her career.
Agency relationships are all or nothing, either empty hookups or sudden, deep, and intense pairings. It’s the pressure, the secrecy. The leadership encouraged them. The fewer attachments to the outside world, the better. She and Sam had grown close early on at Camp Peary, the former Navy base, nicknamed “the Farm,” that housed the Agency’s training grounds. She was younger than Sam but sharper about Agency politics, and he helped her out with his field experience from the army. He remembered working with her on the range one morning, just after dawn. She could shoot an expert grouping at twenty-five yards, but she kept biting her lower lip on one side when she fired. He tried to help her break the habit—it could interfere with the smooth breathing necessary for consistency—but her aim grew worse, so in the end he told her to just keep doing it and tearing out bull’s-eyes. It was always a funny juxtaposition to see her put ten rounds in a paper target’s heart, as cold and lethal as any door kicker, then beam and pump her fist like she was at a pep rally.
A lot of the officers in training would get blitzed on the weekends and pair up as a way to blow off steam. The only places to go around Camp Peary were awful chain restaurants and hotels in strip malls. But for all their attraction, Sam and Emily never crossed that line.
She’d had a marriage fall apart not long before she went to NOC training, and she was still rocked by it then. The guy was a major in the British army. It was an Agency marriage because of an Agency rule: you want to share a bed with someone foreign-born, you’d better be married. They had priests who’d come out and do a ceremony on a few hours’ notice. They’d push people together before they were ready, and between that and the pressure of the job, the relationships would often blow up. Sam never got the full story. By the time she’d gotten over it, they were both on assignment undercover—new countries, new names, new lives. He didn’t really get to see her again until the past couple of years, when she was at headquarters and he was back and forth to DC giving briefings to Jones and some of the brass. Then that one night together. Then it was all over.
Emily stepped away, went to the railing, and looked out at the woods. They stood there in a comfortable silence.
Something snagged in Sam’s mind, something she’d said just a moment ago: He was honored that you gave him a shot with Alex Clarke.
She knew about the Alex Clarke meetings. Fin must have talked to her. He looked up to find Emily watching him. “What is it?” she asked. She was sharp enough to see that something was troubling him.
“You said Fin was honored that I brought him in on the Clarke case. Did he tell you about the work we were doing?”
“He mentioned it.”
“Anything about Geneva? The meeting?”
“No.” She denied it quickly and surely, without overemphasis. Perfectly natural. Or deliberately made to look that way.
Dimos had warned him that there might be a penetration at CIA, and Fin had told her about Clarke. Sam steeled himself and put aside any feelings to weigh the question: Could Emily be the leak? She’d worked with Parker and Hassan too.
He could press, but if she was concealing something, she wouldn’t just give it away, and it was better for him to keep any suspicions hidden for the moment. He wasn’t done here. He needed information from her.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out and glanced at it. A new encrypted message. Dimos had written back.
Emily was watching him now, not revealing any suspicion, but she wouldn’t in any case.
Sam put his hand on the white-painted wood of the railing and looked at her. He’d try a blitz.
“DEMETER,” he said, borrowing a move from the Cypriot, examining her face as closely as Dimos had his. He wanted her reaction.
“What?”
“It’s a cryptonym. For a file, maybe an operation.”
“And?”
“It could be a lead on who killed Fin, who did that bombing, and who’s responsible for the deaths of Parker and Hassan.”
“Fuck, Sam.” She shook her head, her lips pulled into a bitter smile. “The Fin stuff. Memory lane.” She gestured back and forth between them. “This. Are you working me?” The smile disappeared.
“Were you, when you came to my place last night?”
“I was worried about you.” She let the hurt into her voice.
“I need your help on this, Emily.”
“Why?”
“Because I saw a girl get her leg blown off last night. And they’re only getting started.” He thought of Dimos’s deadline. Sunday. Three days left.
“I can’t, Sam.”
“We can stop this.”
“What the hell were you doing meeting with a Russian source? Why didn’t you tell anyone about it? And now you’re asking me about crypts?” The shorthand for cryptonyms. She looked at the papers on the table. “Parker and Hassan are dead. Someone got their names. Someone hunted them down. You know what that means.”
“A leak,” he said.
“Right. So why are you here asking me for classified information?”
