Red Widow by Alma Katsu (good books to read for beginners txt) 📗

first handler, and they had been close. Lyndsey had gotten the old SVR spymaster to give up more on the Russian spy machine than anyone else in CIA’s history. With that success came suspicion. How had a young officer on her first big assignment been able to succeed where no one else had? Was it because she was merely lucky, or had there been some quid pro quo, some double-dealing? There were some—officers with many years of service with nowhere near the same success—who were sure something bad had gone down, that Lyndsey could not have been that good or that lucky. Men who were as sure of it as they were of anything.

They had investigated—and found nothing. Because there was nothing to find.

They can’t seriously think she has been working for Moscow all this time. That she and Popov fed Langley a string of lies to establish her bona fides, to make her look like a wunderkind. In their twisted logic, Popov’s death would make sense: Moscow could’ve killed him to protect her story, if he was the only one who knew the truth . . .

Now there’s Lebanon. Actual proof that she is a bad egg.

Anxiety blooms in her chest like heartburn. She knows there is no link between Yaromir Popov and what happened in Beirut, just as she knows they will look, because that is what the job calls for, chasing ghosts. Hoping to catch something that you can’t see.

This eternal suspicion, which some would call vigilance.

How sad to always be suspicious, she thinks as she looks at Raymond. To never be able to trust anyone you work with, not one hundred percent. What that must do to a person over time, filled with mistrust as corrosive as acid. Stay in the job too long and one day, you’re hiring a private investigator to follow your spouse and having the kids microchipped and installing keylogging software on their computers.

How much does he know about Davis Ranford, about what she did? Everything, probably. No, not everything. He can’t know her feelings. He may know that she and Davis often met at a bar on Armenia Street, even though they avoided nightclubs and going out in general because the threat of being seen together—he was MI6—was too great. But sitting on a restaurant terrace on a Wednesday night to watch the last streaks of light evaporate from the sky seemed safe enough.

She couldn’t date anyone in the Station. It didn’t take a week after she’d arrived to know there was something off about Beirut Station, a toxic boys’ club led by a sadistic Chief of Station. She’d known when she agreed to the assignment that going from the Russia target to the Middle East would be what they liked to call a “challenge,” needing to prove herself all over again to people who’d just as soon not have the competition. She just didn’t know how bad a decision it had been until she walked through the door. That the old guard in the Clandestine Service clearly had it in for her.

She couldn’t be friends with coworkers: she couldn’t trust them, that was clear. She’d reconciled herself to a lonely two-year tour when she met Davis at an embassy function. She sensed right away that he was also an outcast, even if she couldn’t tell what personal failing or mortal sin had made him so. Why his colleagues at the British embassy ostracized him—except maybe jealousy, but she was partial to him. She liked his dry wit.

So many evenings spent on the terrace of the bar on Armenia Street, neither of them saying a word to each other. They’d done a few touristy things—visited the Cedars of God in Kadisha Valley, explored the Jeita Grotto—but more often than not, if they went out in public, they ended up at this terrace bar, sipping gin and listening to bickering rise up from the street below. Davis was in his mid-forties and she’d never dated someone that much older, but it only seemed to amuse him. “It’ll be a huge boost to your ego, you’ll see,” he said with a smile. “You’re so much quicker and nimbler than I am, and know everything that’s popular—books, movies, celebrities—while I will know absolutely nothing. Before long you’ll be wondering what you ever saw in me.”

It wouldn’t last forever, she knew, but she had been in no rush to end it. She liked that he never stumbled by mentioning their world outside of Beirut: saying that she’d have to visit when he went back on home leave, or offering to join her in America at Christmas. Their two worlds had to remain separate. It was why they didn’t venture outside one or the other’s apartment on the weekend: too great a risk of being seen together. Officers from different intelligence services should not date one another.

“I don’t see the harm. You’re British,” she’d said once. “You’re practically American.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” He’d made a face. “Don’t believe that ‘cousins’ talk people like to toss around. MI6 is well aware that Langley hates us, and you’ll find your lovely ass in serious trouble if they find out.”

Davis was the only thing that made Beirut bearable. He was always honest with her, perhaps the only one in the entire strange city. He’d been in MI6 for over twenty years and had come by his jadedness honestly. “I’m in it for the travel. I’m afraid England’s not big enough for me and my family and my ex.”

Sitting in this stuffy room with Murphy, she can still picture Davis on the terrace of the bar, the warm night breeze riffling his hair. Can hear the sounds wafting up from the street below, the honking of taxis and occasional catcall from a shopkeeper, as they sit side by side without speaking, wholly given over to the sultry languor. One time she’d complained about Lebanon, some trifling thing she could no longer remember, telling him she preferred Moscow.

His glance was kind