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

was a complete surprise. We couldn’t believe it when we got the first drops. It was solid gold. Putin’s talking points for upcoming negotiations. Background papers. Decision memos. It was like having keys to Putin’s inner sanctum. We knew exactly what Russian leadership was thinking.”

His joy is still apparent, even after all this time. Lyndsey remains silent, waiting for him to continue.

“Naturally, we thought that the asset must be very, very senior. It had to be someone close to Putin, perhaps an oligarch who had grown rich from Putin’s patronage but had developed a conscience and could no longer stand by while the country was being plundered. Or a top aide who knew all of Putin’s appointments and made sure the right papers were read in advance.” Sheridan turns and gives Lyndsey a sheepish smile. Nearly apologetic. “But Olga Boykova was none of those things. Olga Boykova was a housekeeper.”

Lyndsey can scarcely believe what she’s hearing as Sheridan lays it out. It sounds like a strange, political version of Cinderella. Boykova started at Novo-Ogaryovo, Putin’s official residence just outside of Moscow proper, polishing the floors and working her way up in the household staff. Soon, she was assigned to the small team in the office wing. She had risen quickly despite her youth and lack of seniority—the older members, with a great sense of entitlement, guarded their standing jealously—because she had proven herself an exceptionally hard worker. In a society where initiative and competency were viewed with suspicion, it seemed President Putin appreciated having one person who could find a book when it had been misplaced or turn down sheets exactly the way he liked.

She had been working in Putin’s household for five years when she decided to spy for America.

“It’s not uncommon for foreign intelligence services to recruit household staff as paid informants, but these assets tended to provide little more than tactical information,” Sheridan says. “They could tell you if a principal was drinking more heavily than normal, or who in the inner circle might be open to approach, but often lacked the know-how to go after really good stuff.”

Sheridan walks slowly, hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket. Olga Boykova, he says, appeared to have no such reservations. Richard’s reports documented her deep, irrevocable disappointment in the Russian president. She saw how the elites lived while knowing, intimately, the hopelessness that the average Russian faced. It was no longer the wild, frontier days of her childhood, the time after Gorbachev and later Yeltsin when the Soviet system imploded, the economy tanked, and lawlessness threatened to destroy Russia. Order had been restored, but the badness had only gone underground, disguised itself with fancy new clothes. Now oligarchs siphoned off Russia’s money and hid it in overseas bank accounts, Russia’s wealth unaccountably gone like a once-healthy man suddenly drained of blood.

Vampiry. And she knew who was to blame.

A single, childless woman who had come to Moscow to find work, Boykova was fiercely devoted to the brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews she had left behind in the country. All of them were struggling, she had told Richard in a confession that had made its way into a report. Every day, the average Russian got further and further behind in debt, squeezed on every front to pay more, money that found its way into the pocket of some Putin crony. While people like Boykova drank themselves to death to forget that there was no hope of escape, that they would always be a serf to a self-appointed tsar.

She could not stand by and let him steal her country.

“We were amazed to see what a lowly housekeeper had been able to do. She photographed hundreds of documents. She planted mics and cameras in the most off-limits areas in the palace. She was one of the most daring operatives we’d ever seen, with no regard for her personal safety. Richard”—Sheridan stumbles at the name, choking up—“admired her. He used to say Olga Boykova gave us more in her two years spying for CIA than more highly placed assets managed in their entire careers. Many assets string their handlers along with promises and excuses, you know, hand over dribs and drabs of near-useless information that could’ve easily been had through less dangerous means, and ask for a lot of money. Olga Boykova made them look like fools. Greedy, fearful fools.”

He reaches into his breast pocket and hands Lyndsey a photo of Boykova, obviously taken by a member of a surveillance team during the vetting period. She is a little bird, just sturdy enough to move furniture and spend long days polishing woodwork. Her face is small and triangular with a tiny pursed mouth, serious eyes, and a sober expression. You can see her uniform under a winter coat, sturdy shoes with crepe soles, heavy tights like something a much older woman would wear. In many ways she is the opposite of Theresa, and it makes Lyndsey smile to think of Theresa’s suspicion: surely this wasn’t the sort of woman Richard would fall in love with.

Lyndsey understands why the FSB covered up the whole thing. Normally, if they’d found a traitor and caught the Americans red-handed, they would crow from the rooftops, splash pictures all over the internet, and make the most of it. But they were afraid. Olga Boykova would become a cult hero, a Robin Hood to the Russian people. It would embolden copycats and there weren’t enough FSB officers in Russia to spy on all the disgruntled cooks and nannies in every oligarch’s or corrupt official’s household—if they were allowed to find out about her. So, the FSB swept the whole thing under the carpet. “They even refused to return Richard’s body, because it would be evidence,” Sheridan says. A gust of wind lifts strands of his hair over his head, revealing the shape of the skull beneath. “That’s how afraid they were.”

Lyndsey thanks Edward Sheridan with a handshake and heads back to her car, her mind whirling with each