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

Too bad we can’t interview them, Barker is recorded as saying. Moscow Station says they’re all dead. It was suicide, and that’s why you didn’t tell anyone else what you were doing.

Boykova had betrayed Putin himself; worked in his house, lived under his roof. In passing secrets to the CIA, she made the FSB look like fools. It doesn’t get any more personal than that. The FSB was not going to let her get away, it would’ve meant their heads, not to mention their balls.

We flew everyone in under cover. They rendezvoused at 2300 local time to go over the extraction plan and then deployed along the route. This is all from Eric.

Richard went in alone to meet Boykova. She was hiding in the boiler room of an apartment building in Tverskaya, hadn’t stuck her head out in three days, likely starving and dehydrated. Richard got her close to the safe house—a street in the neighborhood of Arbat is given—when the Russians closed in. Apparently, they’d been tracking them all along.

How did the Russians find out about the op? the head of Special Operations demands. The transcript shows that Eric has no answer.

It appears to have been a slaughter. Station picked up police chatter about a shootout in the area of the safe house. Seven dead, specifically. One alive. We assume the one still living was Boykova.

That makes sense: they’d want to take her alive, to eventually suffer something painful and drawn out before her eventual death. At this point, there is no word on Richard, but he is presumed dead. If he is lucky, he will have died on the scene.

This is a colossal clusterfuck. Barker again.

Has the ambassador been notified? Westinghouse is an asshole. He’s going to go ballistic. He’ll throw us out of country for sure. Deputy Director of Operations.

Eric is dismissed from the meeting, but the record shows he was spoken of harshly. Barker talks about going to the Director of CIA to demand Eric be fired. He has exceeded his authority. He’s responsible for the loss of one officer and the death of British and American contractors.

But what is he guilty of, exactly, the director of Special Operations asks.

Fucking terrible judgment, the deputy director of Operations says.

He didn’t order Richard Warner to go on this suicide mission. Warner asked for it. And if a few mercenaries get killed, what of it? That’s why we hire them, because they’re expendable and because no one will hear about it.

The transcript ends inconclusively.

Hands trembling, Lyndsey turns to the next one. It’s a cable from Moscow Station, two days later, sent in a special channel that’s for the Director, CIA. She can see that it was later turned around to a handful of seniors in what is now the Razorbill compartment.

She runs a finger under each line as she reads, reading it a second time to be sure. The report starts out by saying Ambassador Westinghouse is furious with the Station. There is radio silence from the Russian foreign ministry. It’s like being in the eye of a storm. They know that something may happen at any moment, but they don’t know what. All operations have been placed on lockdown in the meanwhile, sure that the Russians will use any excuse to roll up their officers.

But in the meanwhile, the Station comes in with a bombshell: Carousel, a reliable asset, has reported that the FSB is holding an American spy, a CIA officer. He was captured in a firefight, trying to smuggle a traitor out of the country.

Richard Warner. They have no name, but who else could it be?

Station reports that they are trying to corroborate the asset’s story as well as obtain additional information, but their assets have scurried for cover, afraid to pop their heads up from the foxholes, afraid the FSB is waiting for them. There is nothing to do but sit and wait. Someone has hand-scribbled in a corner of the page, Russian demands?

Lyndsey leans back in her chair. Her chest is tight, her head swirling. She realizes she has been holding her breath.

Richard Warner was alive. At one point, anyway.

Funny. She notices a small red smudge on the upper-right-hand side of the page. Blood? No, too bright for that. Strange.

But she dismisses it. This isn’t the last report, after all. There are a few sheets of paper to go. Taking a deep breath, she starts the last one.

Another memorandum for the record recording another meeting. Two flimsy sheets of paper. This is where they find out Richard is dead, Lyndsey reckons. This is where they learn he was killed by the FSB, dying in a Russian prison hospital, and that the vindictive Russians refuse to return the body.

Except it’s not.

For a formal memorandum, the words are hot and visceral and jump off the page. The meeting starts in outrage, but at least Eric has managed to hold on to his position, if only by his fingertips. He tells the assembled group of furious, fuming Agency seniors that the Russians have refused to acknowledge that anything ever happened, their silence deafening. Moscow Station has speculated it’s because Putin cannot have the truth get out, that one of his housekeepers had the temerity to spy on him, to ferry secrets out from under his nose. It would embolden a whole class of Russians—the serfs—to rise up against the oligarchs. It would be the start of the French Revolution on the banks of the Moskva River.

The FSB has made no demands? No offer to trade Richard Warner for one of their traitors? Not even for Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen, their most successful recruits? CIA seniors are clearly flummoxed.

And, surely, they mean a trade for Richard Warner’s body. The man is dead.

The language is clear: there’s no reference to Richard in the past tense. The understanding is that the man is alive.

What can we do? Barker asks. We can’t leave him to rot in a Russian prison. We owe Richard more than