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

a fan of moonlight, or because a row of tall trees gives her privacy from the neighbors. Tarasenko holds his breath and inches forward, until his face is close to the glass. Carefully, he peers through the gap in the curtains. Kanareyka wouldn’t like it if she found out he’d been spying on her but really, what can spies expect if not surveillance?

There is Kanareyka, her pale skin luminous in the low light. She reminds Tarasenko of a ballerina: elegant and graceful, but also cold and aloof. Not his kind of woman. The room she is in is spare, nearly empty. It’s not a room anyone has been living in, it’s too sad. She is sorting clothing in a cardboard box. Some pieces she drops in a careless pile by her feet, others she puts in a second, smaller box. She moves slowly, deliberating. These are a man’s clothes, Tarasenko figures out. Must be her husband’s. She’s packing clothing for him.

She pauses at one piece, a rather worn and rumpled plaid shirt. It is very American, like something you’d see on a lumberjack in an old drawing. As a case officer, Tarasenko has been schooled in American folklore and history. The stories Americans tell themselves about their country, bedtime stories meant to comfort frightened children. She buries her face in the shirt. He watches for a moment, mesmerized. There is something special about it, her husband’s favorite perhaps, and she hasn’t seen it for years. She wallows in it. He thinks he sees her shoulders heave; is she crying? She has never cried in front of him, though she has had plenty of reason to, and it occurs to him that he had come to assume she did not cry. That something inside her had hardened over the years, because of these bad circumstances. But perhaps she is not completely ruined, yet. Perhaps there is still a vulnerable part deep inside.

They have not told Richard Warner what has happened or what is coming. After hundreds of days in captivity, Richard Warner has given up nothing, not one scrap of information to make it go easier on him, though no one at Langley would blame him if he had. There is no way a man like this will approve of what his wife has done. Morozov had wanted to tell him, because Tarasenko’s boss is a sick fuck. He had come to resent Warner—just as he resents being trapped inside Russia’s borders, CIA as patient as a remorseless mother-in-law—and thought it would be fun to torture him, letting him see that they had gotten forbidden knowledge at his expense. Morozov left it up to Tarasenko, however, and Tarasenko did not see the advantage in tipping his hand. He hated to admit it—he liked to think his operations were airtight—but anything could still happen. Kanareyka could get cold feet, she might be discovered, the Hard Man could catch wind of their plans and put a stop to it. The prospect of the latter, especially, made him nervous, turned his guts to ice water. It was his ass on the line, not Morozov’s, and he had only the wily old general’s word that he would protect him.

Seeing Kanareyka cry shames him. She really does love her husband, to be willing to go to such lengths for him. He thinks of the women in his life and cannot imagine any one of them capable of the same devotion for him. Quite the opposite: they’d applaud his jailers and encourage them to throw away the key. What Kanareyka is doing for her husband takes tremendous courage. He cannot despise her. If anything, he comes to respect her a bit more.

In any case, it looks as if she is proceeding as planned. Satisfied, he scrabbles back the way he came, inching carefully across the roof before dropping down to the covered porch, and then to the ground, stealing back the way he came like the shadow he aspires to be.

—

There is one more thing he needs to do tonight.

He drives a few miles down the highway, following the bright streetlamps. The address he looked up after getting the name from Kanareyka. He wants to know more about his adversary, this Lyndsey Duncan.

The parking lot outside her apartment building is completely still. It is what the Americans call a garden apartment, the buildings only a couple stories tall with open stairwells connecting them. It’s not so late that there aren’t lights on in some of the windows. He pulls a pair of binoculars out of the bag in the passenger’s seat.

The curtains looking into Lyndsey Duncan’s apartment are half-drawn, enough to afford Tarasenko a glimpse inside. It’s tantalizing, like peeking through a keyhole. A figure moves back and forth in the room and for a long time is nothing more than a shadow. Like watching a ghost.

But then she stops right in front of the divide and he can see her clearly. Tall, lithe, strong. Long legs, which he has always liked on a woman. As a matter of fact, he likes everything about her: her confidence, which he can tell by the way she stands. The intelligent expression on her face. Her reddish hair, which falls over her shoulders. He can picture himself twisting that hair around his fist. He can picture himself doing a lot of things with this woman. A familiar, not-unpleasant longing comes over him. It’s all he can do not to charge up those stairs and force his way into the apartment.

He could act on his impulses now, but that would ruin everything. Better to play the long game. He stows the binoculars and starts the engine, heading back to his hotel.

Kukla. That will be his name for Lyndsey Duncan. Doll.

THIRTY-NINE

We’ve had eyes on Cassidy since he landed at National.”

Lyndsey sits inside a humongous black SUV, an FBI agent at the wheel, a second in the passenger seat. Sally Herbert sits next to Lyndsey in