“We talked about this for two days,” said Dominika. “Why would I do that? It would be illogical. I told you this will help me politically. I’m more likely to receive the promotion that Putin—”
“—You won’t get the promotion if you’re in the cellars of Butyrka with a strap around your neck, all because of this obsession with revenge and this stupid jihad you’re waging against them all. You’re poised at the pinnacle. You’re too stubborn to realize that you can hurt them a hundredfold by just being Director SVR and keeping a low profile.”
He felt her stiffen beside him. Dominika got out of bed, wrapped a cotton skirt around her naked body, and started stuffing her few belongings into a shoulder bag.
Nate recognized the flashing eyes and flared nostrils. “Where are you going? We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” he said.
“Jihad? Obsessed? Stupid?” shouted Dominika. “That is what you think of me, of what I am doing? Zhópa, asshole. I’ll die for my country before I sit still and watch them rob us blind. Thank you for your predannost.”
“What are you talking about? I’m devoted to you more than anyone. I want you to survive.”
“By giving up and running? Posh?l ty, piss off! I’m catching the bus to town.” She jammed her feet into flats and slung her bag over her shoulder.
Nate got out of bed. “It’s pitch-black out there. You’ll walk off a ledge in the dark. Let me get a flashlight.”
“Ischézni, get lost,” she yelled and slammed the door and started crunching down the goat path in the dark. Nate threw on pants and flip-flops, grabbed a flashlight, and ran to catch her. She was crying silently as he held her arm and shined the light at their feet. She wouldn’t look at him as they stood in the dark under an olive tree waiting for the late 122 bus, which eventually wheezed around the bend in the road and pulled to a stop. As the doors swung open, Nate expected to see Gable driving and Benford sitting disapprovingly in the back row.
“Call when you arrive in Vienna,” said Nate as the doors hissed shut in his face. The bus ground out of sight toward Glyfada, where she would take a taxi to her embassy.
She’s changed in the last few years. Hotheaded and impossible. Uncontrollable as an agent, and sure to get caught soon. Some clandestine meeting. Some agent handling. Some Romeo. He could hear Gable already. “Congratulations, rookie, you just hit bottom and started digging.”
* * *
* * *
Langley. They were gathered in the small, chaotic conference room of Benford’s CID, Counterintelligence Division, the gray fabric-covered (and soundproof) walls of which were adorned with a row of framed photographs of previous Chiefs of CID in an unsettling chronological sequence, all the way around the room, like a ghoulish martyrs’ wall in a Christian catacomb. Photos from the sixties were sepia-toned, with forgotten Ivy Leaguers in thin ties (JFK years). Kodachrome photos from subsequent decades depicted CID chiefs with hipster sideburns and vapid smiles (Carter); expressions of guilty calculation (Nixon); and the thousand-yard stares of hemispheric liberators (Reagan). The final digital photos were of the modern generation of CID chiefs with expressions of mystified alarm (Clinton, Bush). At the end of the row hung the photograph of the most-recently retired CID director during the modern era, a chuff famous for his implacable conceit. The US flag in the room had with malice been moved partially in front of this photo, so only a single eye of the fomite peered around the fabric, rendering him even creepier in memory than he had been in person. There was no remaining wall space for any additional frames of future ex-chiefs, and rumors of commissioning a ceiling fresco depicting a cherubic, bare-assed Benford with a tiny bow and arrow were, up until now, unsubstantiated.
Like all of Benford’s personal spaces, the conference table was messy, cluttered with paper, coffee mugs, and a doughnut box. Rolled-up maps were stacked in a corner, and a projection screen was torn down the center and patched with duct tape. Two shattered flat-screen monitors were discarded in the far corner of the room, along with the shards of a US Navy coffee mug, which almost certainly had been the projectile that had destroyed at least one of the monitors. Benford, Gable, Forsyth, and Nash were at one end. Hearsey, the tall ectomorph tech chief, came in with two notebooks and sat at the far end. Rugged, rangy, and leather tough, Hearsey looked like someone who should be on the prairie mending barbed-wire fence or using a Burdizzo Emasculatome on bull calves, instead of spending a year in a lab concocting a chemical acid fog—sprayed at night by stealth drone—to embrittle North Korean missile gantries, or developing wrist-worn fitness monitors molded out of Semtex that could be detonated in Dubai from a laboratory in Maryland. An engineer by training, Hearsey knew about railguns, plus he didn’t take guff from Benford, and Gable liked him, so he was read into everything, including the DIVA case.
He was known in the Agency simply as Hearsey—only the mavens in personnel knew his given name was Gayle, and they never revealed anything. Hearsey looked around Benford’s squalid conference room, ran a finger across the crumb-covered table, and contemplated the surrounding detritus.
“I thought the Hindenburg crashed in Lakehurst, New Jersey,” said Hearsey, who could get away with being a wiseass. Benford blinked once.
Sitting at the other end of the table taking notes was Benford’s new assistant, Lucius Westfall, a WMD analyst transferred from the Directorate of Intelligence to the Directorate of Operations, one of scores of CIA Director-mandated sabbaticals designed to forcefully integrate DI analysts with DO operators, which was in most cases like partnering the pastor’s daughters with bargees at a barn dance.
Westfall was blond, thin faced, with wire-rimmed glasses that tended to fog when he spoke publicly or talked to pretty women. It was demanding enough to work for Simon Benford, but Westfall constantly had to decode the aboriginal patois of the Operations Directorate. These ops officers were unintelligible when incessantly talking about bumps, dangles, peddlers, old whores, burn notices, drops, caches, headhunters, scalps, dry cleaning, rabbits, chicken feed, barium enemas, 201s, PRQs, natural reverses, flipping, fluffing, fluttering, and a million other mysteries. As terrifying, Westfall had to weather the depredations of the hulking Marty Gable, who Westfall was convinced had once been a serial killer from Kansas.
“Make sure you take good notes, Luscious,” said Gable, mispronouncing his name with a fake French accent. Gable’s particular style of mentoring a newbie colleague fell somewhere between drill instructor and a chariot driver in the hippodrome. Gable ironically had himself also been dragooned from his rough-and-tumble Africa Division to be Benford’s unlikely deputy. CID was a spooky counterintelligence shop typically staffed with brilliant, quirky introverts who worked in the dark with the shades drawn. Outsiders called it the Island of Broken Toys. Benford wanted Gable less as a substantive deputy, and more as someone who could solve unstable, delicate foreign crises wherever they developed, a function Marty demurely characterized as “breaking the dishes.” DIVA also idolized Gable—he could talk her down out of the tree when she went into her increasingly more frequent conniptions about commo, risk taking, and security.
Benford gaveled the meeting to order with the solemnity for which he was known in Washington, London, Ottawa, Canberra, Bonn, Paris, Rome, and Tel Aviv, by slamming a file folder on the table, with his trademark invocation.
“Jesus Fucking Christ. If DIVA’s intel is right, we have a fucking fuckwad selling fucking secrets on the rail-fucking-gun to North Korea.”
Just back from Athens, Nash read off a paper. “DIVA just reported by SRAC this morning. The SVR has encrypted this North Korean Professor Ri Sou-yong PECHKA, which means ‘furnace’ in Russian,” he said.