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

friends. She could’ve just made a big mistake. “Masha said her husband didn’t trust Cassidy.”

“You know as well as I that assets don’t always get along with their handlers. ‘Trust’ can mean a lot of things.”

She weighs how much she should share. “Reese, I think Popov was on his way to Washington because he had something he wanted to tell me.”

“Even if that was the case, you can’t be sure it had anything to do with Cassidy. Here’s my opinion. You may not want to hear it, but . . . Tom Cassidy doesn’t seem the type to sell out to the Russians. Not to me. The guy’s main problem is that he’s ambitious. Very ambitious. He wants to succeed, but inside the system. He doesn’t want to burn the whole thing down.”

Is Reese right? Lyndsey has no way of knowing without meeting Cassidy for herself. In the meanwhile, she’s always known Reese’s judgment to be sound. She should trust him—for now.

“Thanks, Reese.” As she hangs up, it hits her how much she wishes it was Reese here at Langley. How much she trusts him. How exposed she feels at headquarters, near-friendless and alone.

SIXTEEN

A flicker from the computer screen catches Lyndsey’s eye. Her chat window blinks at her. She squints: there’s a message from Randy Detwiler, the poison expert. I have a thought about the toxicology report. Come see me. I am at a conference the rest of today but will be back in the office tomorrow . . .

She makes a mental note to contact Detwiler in the morning.

In the meantime, she thinks about how she found Detwiler. The tool that helps you find experts scattered across the Agency. Perhaps she can use it to find someone who could advise her on this investigation, weigh in on what she’s done and tell her what she needs to do next. She feels like she’s missing a lot.

Instead of searching on some term—unsure of what term to try—Lyndsey goes to the forum home page. There’s an index of groups by topics. She marvels as she scans pages and pages of topics, a map of parts of the Agency she never knew about. Who would’ve thought there were experts here on desert agriculture and renewable energy and econometrics? It seems endless, this river of expertise.

She comes to the section on Russia. It is huge, bigger than all the other categories—of course. It is one of the oldest and most important targets. She is transfixed as she pages through the subgroups and threads of discussion. No wonder Russia Division is so quiet: the office chatter has gone underground. They quietly ask questions of one another in this forum, everything from the mundane (Is there a problem with the printers this morning?) to the profound (Who will rise to lead the All-Russia People’s Front if Putin were to die suddenly?). Lyndsey tiptoes through the threads, feeling as though she has stumbled on a secret cocktail party, eavesdropping on conversations and no one realizes she’s there.

You could use this to spy on the office. It doesn’t provide everything you need to know, but it would be a start. It would point you in the right direction, provide clues.

She works her way methodically through the sub-forums, noting who is working on which targets and who chimes in on their threads. She watches the communities forum. The names start to repeat themselves: here’s the guy who always has an opinion on Russian weapons, here’s the guy who knows everything about Russian troll farms. The names rarely cross between groups and the ones that do are either the sage hands who have worked in the Division forever or the burnouts with too much time on their hands.

She fleshes out a diagram on a piece of paper. In the middle of each group are the people who ask the most questions on a subject or seem to be at the center of discussions on that topic. Next, she lists the people who chime in or occasionally post their own questions. She fills a page, then three, then five. Two hours later, she has pieced together a skeleton of a network diagram of the office. The curious thing, she sees, is that it provides a level of detail that isn’t generally known, the precise targets or cases—or assets—that are only known to supervisors.

Lyndsey runs her finger along the spokes in the diagram. There is Jan Westerling, the reports officer for Lighthouse, the scientist, surrounded by all things Russian research and development. She asks questions about metamaterials and nanotubes and 3D printing. The number of people in her circle are few. The names Lyndsey doesn’t recognize she assumes are in the Directorate of Science and Technology but there are some from Russia Division, people she knows.

Kyle Kincaid sits at the intersection of military targets and cyber. The group that follows his posts is made of military and cyber experts and they mix it up freely. Though she notices Kincaid doesn’t post many questions himself; probably doesn’t want to be seen needing help. Mostly he chimes in on other officers’ posts or gives his opinion on a breaking piece of news. She smiles when she sees one of the old Russia hands smack down one of his naïve assumptions. It stings when it happens but it’s how you get better in this business, being schooled gently in public.

Still, Lyndsey hasn’t found any posts explicitly about Lighthouse or Skipjack, the military officer. You could infer a few things from the posts she’s seen, but nothing about a specific asset and certainly no true names.

Lyndsey stands and stretches. She looks at the clock on her monitor: it’s nearly one p.m. No wonder she’s stiff: she’s been sitting motionless for hours.

Her eye falls back to her notes, lingering over the crude network diagram. It’s like she’s got a whole new way of thinking about the people in the Division, like she can see an invisible spider’s web that connects them. Ruth Mallory tends all the