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

step. Knowing what Theresa thinks—what she’s shared, anyway—Lyndsey has to believe these reports would give Theresa some comfort. She’d see the valuable information Boykova gave them, and while she might never agree with what Richard did, she might begrudge his sacrifice a little bit less.

It might give her some peace.

She thinks back to the crude network diagram and how Theresa’s name kept popping up. A mistake, surely. There has to be an explanation.

The two thoughts rattle around in the back of her mind during the drive back.

—

Lyndsey has just taken off her coat and settled back at her desk when there’s a knock at the door. Jan Westerling stands in the doorway, wobbling uncertainly on those four-inch heels. “I thought of something. Someone, actually.”

Westerling sits in the chair opposite Lyndsey’s desk like a reluctant witness at a police station. The reports officer is visually nervous, her fingers intertwined to keep them occupied, thumbs wrestling. Whatever she’s got to say, she doesn’t want to say it, would prefer to keep it bottled up inside. But duty prevents her.

Lyndsey listens patiently as the words come spilling out. How it didn’t seem strange to her at first when Theresa Warner came to talk to her. They work in the same office on the same team, after all, The Widow’s desk just fifty feet away. After the second visit, however, Westerling wondered why Theresa Warner was being friendly now when she’d been in the office for over a year and Theresa hadn’t shown any interest in her in all that time. She dismissed this as being paranoid. Westerling had gotten kudos for a recent project: sometimes that thawed out the old-timers. They would suddenly notice you, as though you hadn’t been toiling away in obscurity under their noses. She decided at the time to be happy about it, not bitter. She hadn’t thought to be suspicious.

Until now.

“Did she try to find out Lighthouse’s identity?” Lyndsey asks.

Westerling narrows her eyes as she thinks. “I’d say yes, definitely, but in a roundabout way. Not asking directly, so my radar wouldn’t go up.”

“When was this?”

Squints, again. “About four months ago, maybe? No, four months for sure, because it happened right around the time of the annual conference with the Brits and she made a point of saying she’d recommend that I got to go this year.”

“But you didn’t give her Lighthouse’s true name or where he worked?”

Westerling pulls back as though hurt. “Of course not.”

Then would Theresa—if she is the mole; Lyndsey chides herself for the mental slip—have found it? “Do you have this information written down anywhere . . . paper copies of reports?”

Westerling knits her brow. “Of course. But I keep that stuff in my safe.”

“Could you do me a favor? Could you get all those reports from your safe and bring them to me? But try not to touch them, and put them in a folder or envelope before you bring them to me.” It’s a long shot, but perhaps they can get fingerprints off them. She’s not even sure there’s someone at the Agency who can dust for prints, or if it’s possible to get fingerprints off paper, but it’s worth a try.

Westerling gives her a perplexed look, but she nods, and leaves.

Once Lyndsey is by herself, she rifles through a drawer until she finds what she’s looking for: the network diagram from the other day. Theresa’s name is all over it.

But so is Evelyn Wang’s. The name Kincaid had mentioned.

She spends another few minutes studying it more closely, then logs in to the forum, searching out Wang’s profile. She has a ridiculously high number of posts, far above average. Lyndsey starts reading through them, in reverse order, and finds it’s just as Evert Northrop said: Evelyn Wang is a friendly girl. She sprinkles pleasantries on every thread. Maybe she’s trying to make friends—or more accurately, keep from making enemies. Or maybe she’s trying to win Miss Congeniality. Could she be the mole? It doesn’t seem likely.

Then there’s Theresa. Lyndsey remembers her first day back in the office, the coolness.

Not Miss Congeniality. Unless it serves a purpose. Still—is that fair? Since then, Theresa has been good to her. The warmth feels genuine: stopping by to say hello every morning, dropping off homemade banana bread wrapped in foil (I made too much and thought you might like some . . . I don’t suppose you’re much of a baker).

Banana bread? Don’t be a sap.

Lyndsey lets out a long breath. Finally, the clues are starting to come together.

The only problem is, she’s not sure she likes the direction they’re headed.

TWENTY-ONE

SIX MONTHS EARLIER

After Jack Clemens’s confession, every minute of Theresa’s day, it seemed, was an exercise in anger management. Seemingly every minute at work, she had to keep from breaking out in a screaming rage. Snapping at the neighbors or her mother on the phone, keep from bursting into tears in front of her son. (Tears were saved for evening, after she’d gone to bed and had closed the door on the world.)

She had to confirm what Jack had told her, to see with her own eyes how badly she’d been betrayed. Getting her hands on the report was out of the question, however. It would be highly compartmented. There wouldn’t be a copy in the office, not if even Eric wasn’t aware of its existence. The only place she could be sure of finding it would be a vault hidden away in the bowels of the building, a place where paper copies were kept of all sensitive reporting. Paper because many of these were historical records, written before the digital age. Paper, too, so they would survive an electromagnetic pulse or other type of twenty-first-century disaster.

The vault was a lonely little outpost manned during the day by a retiree hired back specifically for this assignment. She’d gotten to know him shortly after Richard’s disastrous operation, hoping to bully her way into seeing all the privileged records. The old man had proven impervious to her