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

she only had one name and a minnow at that: not enough to convince the Russians to work with her.

It was a gamble but . . . Maybe she could warn Skipjack before the Russians came to arrest him. They’d be happy to get the names and it would take time to evaluate them, but by then they’d have already released Richard. There would be damage, but she would try to minimize that.

Two potential names to give to the Russians. She turned both cases over in her mind, trying to be sure she wasn’t overlooking anything, missing an important thread that could lead back to her. Thinking, too, of the consequences for others. For the two reports officers, Westerling and Kincaid, there would be fallout. She felt bad for Westerling, not so much for Kincaid—she had the feeling he’d been hitting on her. It would look bad for Westerling but she’d survive. She’d get a second chance. The assets, Lighthouse and Skipjack, would get it worse. They would bear the brunt. But they would only go to prison. This wasn’t the bad old days of the Soviet Union. Spies weren’t executed or sent to hard labor camps, left to freeze and starve in a Siberian gulag.

In any case, she wouldn’t let it keep her up at night. This was part of the deal when you decided to spy for the enemy. If you didn’t realize the danger, you were a fool. And whatever happened to them was nothing compared with what her husband had suffered. That made her feel better—or at least less bad—about what she had made up her mind to do.

TWENTY-THREE

A good summer day in Washington was like nowhere else in the world. The skies were the clearest blue, the air the perfect balance of cool and warm. Washington’s infamous heat and humidity was nowhere to be seen.

It’s a beautiful day. That’s how I’ll remember it, always, the day I sold out to the Russians.

For two weeks, she faithfully kept an eye out for the signal that would tell her the Russians were ready to meet. That happened yesterday. A chalk mark on the lamppost meant they met the next day at the prearranged time and place. She almost couldn’t believe they had made a decision to proceed so quickly. It was so quick, almost irresponsible. It pleased and frightened her in nearly equal measure.

But it also peeved her, because it was a weekday morning. She had to call in sick to make the meet, even though she resented it. Being a parent, she’d used up too many sick days and vacation days as it was, but someone had to stay home when Brian got a cold or he had to go to the pediatrician. In a way, it was easier since Brian was with the sitter she’d found for the summer. And she was completely confident by now that the Agency wasn’t watching her. Taking a sick day wouldn’t be a trigger.

She noticed as she dressed for the meeting that she couldn’t feel her fingers. It was as though she was having an out-of-body experience, or a stroke. Her mind floated like a helium balloon as she applied her lipstick—Chanel’s Rouge Rebelle—and combed her hair. She’d have thought this would be easier since she’d met with the Russians once, the ice broken, but there was something different about this time. Edgier. Scarier. Like she was about to jump off a bridge.

They were to meet at the National Building Museum, a long brick building in the middle of bustling Gallery Place, with all its shops and restaurants and tourist attractions. Not that she was familiar with any of it. She’d been to the building museum once to see the Smithsonian’s annual crafts show. Otherwise, she never spent time there; downtown D.C. was a swamp of traffic, too much road construction with too little parking. Suburbia was for mothers like her; D.C. was for hipsters and tourists, and never the twain shall meet.

Theresa thought the museum an odd place for a meeting until she stepped inside and saw that it was perfect: a big, open area, which made it easy to surveil, and multiple entrances and exits for an easy escape if needed. There were several exhibits going on, which provided a bustling crowd for cover. The exhibit in the main hall was a huge collection of paper models of famous buildings. The Reichstag, the Alhambra, the Bolshoi Theatre, the Empire State Building and the Flatiron, the Old North Church. Glass boxes filled with large, cumbersome paper skyscrapers and monuments made a maze of the space, ideal for avoiding detection. The people ambling about were mostly affluent-looking retirees, in the city for a day of sightseeing. A pair of young mothers sat at a table outside the tiny coffee shop, strollers at their sides, their children running between the tables, their laughter echoing off the vaulted ceiling. It all looked normal. Nothing set off her sixth sense for trouble.

After a few minutes, a man slipped into the exhibit area with a stack of files under his arm. There was a green folder on top, the signal they’d arranged. She followed him for a minute to satisfy herself that he was the one. Perhaps it was guilty knowledge, but Theresa thought he looked like a bad guy, possibly more so than anyone she’d ever met during her time at the Agency, and she’d met her share of dubious characters. He was in his mid-thirties and moved with the ease of an athlete. Better dressed than the average FSB or SVR agent, who tended to look like policemen in cheap suits. Beneath the polished veneer, however, there were rough bits. He had a scar next to his left eye, running back to the temple, as though someone had hit him there very hard, maybe even tried to kill him. There was a hint of desperation in the eyes and tight jaw. A striver, her friends might say. A