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

back at us . . . I hate to say it, but I can see it. She’s lost everything, and she wants us to suffer, too.”

Can Lyndsey see that, too? She thinks of the conversations over coffee in the cafeteria. The bitter asides. The warning from Maggie. Yes, she can see it. It’s a possibility.

“If this is true . . . If this is the case, Lyndsey, we have to bring her down. She can’t get away with it.”

“Of course.” It goes without saying. She never thought that in her career she’d find a traitor in their midst, but now that she has she knows what her duty is.

Eric leans toward her. “Don’t tell anyone else about this. Confirm your suspicions, then come to me first. We’ll figure out the next steps—together.”

He stands and paces away from his desk, strangely energized, like a fuse has been lit. “You should know . . . I have another operation going on right now with Moscow Station. It doesn’t have anything to do with your investigation, but . . . If anything weird comes up on the Moscow end, before you spend too much time trying to figure out what it is, come to me.”

She nods. This isn’t too uncommon. Special operations are close-hold by nature, restricted to the handful of people directly involved. It could get messy to let one special operation, like her investigation, bleed into another. It could end up contaminating the cases, mislead you into thinking one had something to do with the other when there was no evidence to go on, nothing beyond your own suspicions. This is part of the clandestine life, being able to live with uncertainty, knowing you can never have all the pieces of the puzzle, knowing when you have enough of them.

“Speaking of the Station,” she says, “I need to talk to Tom Cassidy, but he’s not returning my messages. I was thinking of going to Hank—”

“You’re not still on whatever it was that Masha Popov said to you?” Eric waves off the idea with his hands. “If there was anything to it, we would’ve found out by now . . . You probably haven’t heard from Tom because he’s helping me with this other operation. I’ll ask him to get back to you—you don’t have to get Hank involved.” That decided, Eric settles back in his chair, a big smile on his face as he thinks about this other operation. “It has a lot of potential,” he says, leaning back into the creaking chair. “Could be really big. I probably shouldn’t talk about it, but . . . You heard about when COS Kiev was killed, right?”

“It was before my time, but yeah.”

Eric swells with self-satisfaction. “Well, I think we’re finally going to be able to bring the man behind the hit, Evgeni Morozov, to justice. That’s a big deal to the seventh floor, you know. Something they’ve wanted for a long time.”

“Aren’t you a little bit daunted, to have to juggle so many potentially cataclysmic things?”

He chuckles. “No—it comes with being Chief of the Division. I guess I’ve gotten used to it. Life would be dull without it.”

She’s heard this about Eric, that he likes being the man on the flying trapeze. That he was this way before he moved up in management. Addicted to risk. There’s a sign hanging above his desk in the office, like something a motivational speaker would say: no risk, no reward.

“I think you’re on the right track here, Lyndsey. It feels—right.”

“I wish it weren’t. You’re not going to talk to anyone about this until I’ve had the chance to do more work, right?” Lyndsey isn’t comfortable. There’s something about Theresa’s motives that seems incomplete, despite what Eric says. She wishes she felt more comfortable with what she’s just done, admitting her suspicions about Theresa. Eric is technically responsible for this investigation. He has a right to be informed. And yet—as she walks out of his office—something doesn’t feel right.

—

Lyndsey turns over her conversation with Eric as she drives home, still sick to her stomach for having voiced her suspicions about Theresa out loud.

Theresa has suffered. It doesn’t feel right to have these suspicions about her. And now she’s told Eric. She wants to trust him. She should trust him. He doesn’t seem like others she’d known, eager to make a name for themselves and not caring who gets hurt in the process. Like the Chief of Station she’d worked for in Lebanon, or the managers in the Clandestine Service who sent her to Beirut hoping for the worst. She’d questioned it at the time—she was doing well with the Russian target, why move her to something different?—but she was told she needed to prove herself on unfamiliar ground. A real superstar will rise to the occasion, Chief of Station Beirut had told her with a glint in his eyes that she chose to ignore. She wanted to believe all the honey they poured in her ear.

Beirut. As it turned out, her enemies didn’t have to lift a finger. She gave them all the ammo they needed to shoot her down.

Davis was the opposite of the men she’d tended toward in nearly every way: older, cynical, and worldly. She’d had no intention of getting serious with him. She had played it chaste in Moscow, not wanting to get a reputation, not with Reese looking over her shoulder, and besides, running Popov had kept her busy. As far as the Station knew when she arrived in Lebanon, she was a single woman. She was ready to have fun.

She figured wrong.

She had played into the hands of the people who wanted to see her fail. Not that she’d had a real nemesis. There was no one specific person out for her blood. No, the Clandestine Service brought her down for sport but also on principle: there would always be someone waiting to see you fall for no other reason than they thought you had succeeded too easily. And hadn’t she gone and proved they were right? A smart woman wouldn’t have taken up with Davis