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

Given what Detwiler told her about the effectiveness of the poison, time of death, and duration of the flight, it’s very likely that Popov’s killer is one of these people.

Delta flies an Airbus A330 on this route, 335 seats: she knows this because she looked it up already. She eyes the list. According to the manifest, it was fairly empty. Inwardly, she groans: that’s still over a hundred people to check, when you take pilots and crew into consideration.

There is nothing to do but start searching in Agency databases. If nothing shakes out, if there are no matches, first thing in the morning she will ask FBI to run the names through their files. There’s a good chance FBI will have information CIA doesn’t, information germane to law enforcement, access to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, not to mention arrest records.

By this point, the office is empty. The last person to leave, Evert Northrop, stopped by her office to tell her so she could lock the door behind him, standard protocol. It’s now one a.m., and Lyndsey pauses in her work. Her eyes are so tired, she’s unable to focus on the words on the monitor. She’s halfway down the list and questioning the usefulness of this approach. So far, she’s gotten a big fat goose egg: not one passenger has appeared in the Agency’s databases, meaning the person has no connection to intelligence, was never an asset or informant, never worked for the Agency, or their name never came up in a report, ever.

She decides to switch tactics and begins to search on the open internet. What she sees quickly confirms her suspicions: the passengers were mostly Russian businessmen, or if they’re spies, they’ve built a plausible cover. And the vast majority of names are Russian. The few Americans are mostly businessmen, too. There’s a smattering of students, and retirees on a packaged holiday tour. No one on the list jumps out at her yet, and that makes her nervous. The two pilots are former military, and it seems unlikely that one of them would be a secret assassin for the FSB.

Then she finds something. One of the passengers is former Special Operations—only he’s American, not Russian. Navy SEAL, then Blackwater, then a few years at other private security firms before disappearing into the ether like a ghost. The downward spiral through the industry, frequently switching between employers, is a bad sign. Or maybe he’s fine and not screwed-up in the least and there are other reasons he can’t hold a job. She’s met enough of these guys and heard enough stories to know that some—a minority, but still some—drink the Kool-Aid and get lost, drawn to the use of violence, finding they like being in places where there are few rules and even fewer people to enforce them.

Their resumes read like this one.

Still, he’s American. The FSB would never hire an American to kill Popov. They have more than enough men to handle it in-house. Nothing to see here.

Except . . . the name seems familiar. Claude Simon is just uncommon enough of a name not to be something she’d picked up from a celebrity news rag or overheard on television. Could he have been coming home from a private security job in Russia? The odds are long that a job like that would be completely innocent. There are plenty of Russian mercenaries in the country already—why would a Russian company hire foreign mercenaries—and an American at that?

She goes back to the classified files and starts searching on the name. She tries every kind of database open to her, logs, personnel databases, anything and everything. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

She is jotting the name on the list going to FBI—maybe they’ll have something on him—when one of the open windows beeps at her: she’s got a hit on one of her searches. It’s a reporting database, another internal memo for the record. She leans closer to the screen. It’s late and she’s tired and her eyesight is failing, and she knows the odds of this having anything to do with Popov are slim to none. She’s not even sure why she’s bothering with this level of diligence . . .

Except it is germane. Or it seems to be . . . She fights exhaustion to make sense of what she’s reading. The report has to do with the planning of an operation in theater a couple years ago, an exfiltration, and there is Claude Simon’s name. Freelance security. Lyndsey reads through his list of qualifications, which all have to do with weapons, the terrible places where he’s willing to work, the terrible things he’s willing to do.

What was he doing on that flight?

His business is making bad things happen.

And a man died on that flight. Could it be nothing more than a coincidence?

She goes back to the old report, scanning quickly through the next part, anxious to see if the report says who brought up his name. Who knew of Claude Simon. Who wanted to hire him for the extraction team, so long ago.

Lyndsey’s heart stops for one long beat.

It was Eric Newman.

—

Somehow, Lyndsey manages to leave her office. Locks up her notes in the safe—she’s not going to take chances leaving it in a simple locked cabinet now. She drives home through the quiet streets of Tysons Corner even though her mind is racing in a million directions at once.

Don’t jump to any conclusions now. Get some sleep. Things will look different in the morning.

They’d better. Because everything she can think of is crazy, crazy, crazy. Not only the link she’s found between Popov’s killer and Eric Newman but Theresa’s connection to Kincaid. And the fact that Kincaid is in the hospital, near death. The truth is still in shadow, though she feels as though she’s getting closer to it. Almost close enough to grasp.

In bed, she twists and turns, wrapping cool sheets around her overheated body. She is desperate to fall asleep but can’t stop thinking about what it means