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

Raymond Murphy is waiting in the next room. He sits on the edge of the table, arms crossed over his chest, chewing his bottom lip, but stands when Lyndsey enters.

His face shines with excitement, like a dog who has caught a hare. “So—what do you think?” He wants the human lie detector to congratulate him.

“I couldn’t tell if she’s hiding something but . . . it felt like the truth.”

He is crestfallen and stares at her with displeasure. “And you were able to come to this conclusion after just a couple minutes with her?”

“I’m not done yet. Let me ask you—have there been other incidents in the past? Have you spoken to her former supervisors?” She doesn’t want to bother Reese if Murphy’s already spoken to him.

The Counterintelligence officer squirms. “I’ve spoken to some of them—but I’m not done with my investigation, either.” Defensive. She’s caught him in a lie. “But I think you’re wrong. I say where there’s smoke, there’s fire. People aren’t just a little bad, Lyndsey. There’s something else going on here, I know it.” She catches the subtext here. He’s talking about her.

It’s early days in the investigation and Raymond is undoubtedly under pressure by his management to find the guilty party fast, just as Eric is under pressure from the Director. She understands why he wants her to agree with him, but she feels in her bones that he’s wrong.

Franklin is not the mole.

Should she argue with him? It would be pointless, she decides. He needs to figure this out for himself. “Fine—you do that. In the meantime, I’ll continue with my end of the investigation.” It was inevitable that she would clash with Raymond but she doesn’t like the way things are going with him. She throws the door open and exits before she can say anything worse.

FIFTEEN

Lyndsey checks her watch once, twice, three times in five minutes. She hasn’t spoken to Reese Munroe, the Chief of Station when she was posted to Moscow, since she’d left a few years ago. Chiefs of Station were important, busy positions. Lyndsey regretted losing touch with her former boss but had expected no different. That was how it went with people shuttling off to positions in other parts of the world, Beirut for Lyndsey, Minsk for Munroe. She’d emailed him a few days earlier, mentioning Kate Franklin’s name and asking if he could find the time to talk. An officer at Minsk Station got in touch right away to arrange a time, not a good sign.

She sits at her desk, drumming her fingers as she waits for the call. Why has she let so much time pass since talking to Reese? Of all the bosses she’s had, he has been the best, even better than Eric. He believed in her when she was a rookie in his Station. A father figure to a girl who barely remembered having one.

She needs someone to believe in her now.

Lyndsey remembers the night that changed her life: Yaromir Popov had made contact and asked her to meet him in secret. She was a rookie then, knew just enough to know she might be misreading the encounter, that it might not be the godsend, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that case officers dreamed about. She was so excited that she couldn’t wait for morning, and she had called Reese, Moscow Chief of Station, right away.

—

They met in a coffee shop that night, a block away from his home in the neighborhood of Barrikadnaya, not far from the U.S. embassy compound, Reese still in the suit he’d worn all day, stirring his coffee as Lyndsey told him what had happened at the party. “He wants to meet tomorrow.” Even though she’d only been working for Reese a few months, she felt they had a good relationship. He’d already given her more autonomy than the rest of his case officers—though that could all be over after tonight.

The ring of the metal spoon as Reese tapped it against the thick mug. “It could be a trap.”

But when she had looked Popov in the eye, she thought she had seen something there. She held on to that. “If the SVR only wanted to go on a fishing expedition, they would have sent a lower-level officer, someone more plausible.”

The restaurant’s overhead light had cast Reese in a harsh shadow, deepening the lines on his face. He looked like a man who’d spent a lifetime in a prison cell. “He wants to meet in less than twenty-four hours. We won’t have time to take the proper precautions. That’s just what they’d do if they wanted to test us. See what our weaknesses are.”

“Or he might be rushing so his people won’t have time to get him under surveillance.”

They both had known at the time that the Agency was struggling in Moscow. Russian internal security seemingly had doubled down on them, and in two years, the Station had picked up no new assets. “When was the last time we had someone with this kind of inside access? Let’s hear him out, at least. What have we got to lose?”

He’d given her a sober look. “They could arrest you. Throw you in jail.”

It could happen. They were trained for it: a little rough treatment, a couple nights in jail. But the SVR tended to throw disgraced intelligence officers out of the country quickly, persona non grata, rather than hold on to them.

The long-term implications were huge. If Lyndsey were caught, her career probably wouldn’t survive. It had just started to look up with the early posting to Moscow: most of her friends were slogging away at backwater posts in far-flung corners of the globe, hoping someone back at Langley read their reports. She could be throwing all that away. She had to pick her battles.

Her gut told her that this was the battle to pick.

“This whole thing doesn’t feel right,” Reese warned her at the time. “They would try something like this if they wanted to