The Other Woman: A Novel Read online

  Eva downed another glass of vodka.

  “Take it easy,” said Mikhail. “I need you to keep your wits about you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “How does Rebecca tell you when she wants to hand over material?”

  “She leaves the light on at the end of the walk.”

  “Where are the drop sites?”

  “Currently, we have four.”

  “What are the fallbacks? What’s the body talk?”

  “Thanks to Sasha, I can tell you all of that in my sleep. And more.” Eva reached for the vodka again, but Mikhail moved the glass aside. “If you know the identity of the mole,” she asked, “why do you need me?”

  Mikhail didn’t answer.

  “And if I agree to cooperate?”

  “I thought we covered that ground.”

  “No prison?”

  Mikhail shook his head. No prison.

  “Where will I go?”

  “Back to Russia, I suppose.”

  “After helping you catch Sasha’s mole? They’ll interrogate me for a few months in Lefortovo Prison and then—” She fashioned her hand into the shape of a gun and placed the tip of her forefinger to the nape of her neck.

  “Vysshaya mera,” said Mikhail.

  She lowered her hand and reclaimed her glass of vodka. “I would prefer to remain here in America.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re not Americans.”

  “You’re British?”

  “Some of us.”

  “So I’ll go to England.”

  “Or perhaps Israel,” he suggested.

  She made a sour face.

  “It’s really not so bad, you know.”

  “I hear there are a lot of Russians there.”

  “More every day,” said Mikhail.

  There was a small window next to the table. MacArthur Boulevard was quiet and damp. Christopher Keller was sitting in a parked car at the edge of the reservoir, along with a couple of security kids from the embassy. In another car was a courier from the station who was awaiting Mikhail’s order to come upstairs and take possession of Eva’s SVR communications gear.

  She had finished her vodka and was drinking Mikhail’s. “I have a class tomorrow morning.”

  “A class?”

  She explained.

  “What time?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “Save a spot for me.”

  She smirked.

  “Any scheduled deliveries from Rebecca?”

  “I just serviced her. I probably won’t hear from her for another week or two.”

  “Actually,” said Mikhail, “you’ll be hearing from her a lot sooner than you think.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow night, I suspect.”

  “And after I take delivery?”

  “Poof,” said Mikhail.

  Eva raised her glass. “To one more night at Brussels Midi. You wouldn’t believe the customers I had tonight.”

  “Bartholomew, party of two, eight o’clock.”

  “How did you know?”

  Mikhail picked up the polished metal device. “Maybe you should show me how this thing works.”

  “It’s easy, actually.”

  Mikhail flipped one of the switches. “Like this?”

  “No, you idiot. Like this.”

  57

  Forest Hills, Washington

  Forest Hills is a moneyed enclave of colonial, Tudor, and Federal-style homes located in far Northwest Washington between Connecticut Avenue and Rock Creek. The house on Chesapeake Street, however, bore little resemblance to its stately neighbors. A postmodern slab of gray perched atop its own leafy promontory, it looked more like a gun emplacement than a dwelling. The high brick wall and formidable iron gate only added to the air of belligerence.

  The owner of this neighborhood eyesore was none other than the State of Israel, and the unlucky occupant was its ambassador to the United States. The current envoy, a man with many children, had forsaken the official residence for a home in an affluent golfing community in Maryland. Unoccupied, the house on Chesapeake Street had fallen into a state of disrepair, thus making it entirely suitable for use as a forward command post for a large operational team. From adversity, believed Gabriel, came unit cohesion.

  For better or worse, the crumbling old house was laid out on a single level. There was a large open sitting room at the center, with a kitchen and dining room on one side and several bedrooms on the other. Gabriel established his office in the comfortable study. Yossi and Rimona—known at Brussels Midi as Simon and Vanessa Bartholomew—worked at a folding trestle table outside his door, along with Eli Lavon and Yaakov Rossman. Ilan the computer geek inhabited a private island at the opposite end of the room. The walls were covered with large-scale maps of Washington and the surrounding suburbs. There was even a rolling whiteboard for Gabriel’s personal use. On it, in his elegant Hebrew script, he had written the words of Shamron’s Eleventh Commandment. Don’t get caught . . .

  Gabriel had accepted Shamron’s suggestion of a routine meeting to explain the presence of the team in Washington. He had not, however, informed the Americans about the “meeting” directly. Instead, he had made enough noise through insecure phone calls and e-mails to let them know he was coming. The NSA and Langley had picked up on his signals. In fact, Adrian Carter, the CIA’s longtime deputy director for operations, sent Gabriel an e-mail a few minutes after he arrived at Dulles, wondering if he was free for a drink. Gabriel told Carter he would try to squeeze him into his busy schedule but wasn’t optimistic. Carter’s sarcastic response—Who’s the lucky girl?—nearly led Gabriel to get back on his plane.

  The house on Chesapeake Street was the target of NSA surveillance whenever an ambassador was present, and Gabriel and his team assumed the NSA was eavesdropping on them now. While inside the house, they maintained a benign background chatter—in the jargon, it was known as “talking to the walls”—but all operationally sensitive information they exchanged by hand signals, in writing on the whiteboard, or in muted conversations conducted outside in the garden. One such conversation occurred shortly after 2:00 a.m., when a courier arrived at the residence bearing Eva Fernandes’s SVR communications hardware, along with Mikhail’s operating instructions. Gabriel surrendered the device to Ilan, who reacted as though he had just been handed a day-old copy of the Washington Post rather than the crown jewels of the SVR.

  By four that morning, Ilan had yet to crack the device’s formidable encryption firewall. Gabriel, who was watching over him with the anxiety of a parent at a recital, decided his time would be better spent catching a few hours of rest. He stretched out on the couch in the study and, lulled by the sound of tree limbs scratching against the side of the house, fell into a dreamless sleep. He woke to the sight of Ilan’s pasty face floating above him. Ilan was the cyber equivalent of Mozart. First computer code at five, first hack at eight, first covert op against the Iranian nuclear program at twenty-one. He had worked with the Americans on a malware virus code-named Olympic Games. The rest of the world knew the worm as Stuxnet. Ilan didn’t get outside much.

  “Is there a problem?” asked Gabriel.

  “No problem at all, boss.”

  “Then why do you look so worried?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You didn’t break the damn thing, did you?”

  “Come have a look.”

  Gabriel swung his feet to the floor and followed Ilan to his worktable. On it was a laptop computer, an iPhone, and the SVR SRAC device.

  “The Russian agent told Mikhail that the range is one hundred feet. It’s actually closer to a hundred and ten. I tested it.” Ilan handed Gabriel the iPhone, which was displaying a list of available networks. One was identified by twelve nonsensical characters: jdlcvhjdvodn. “That’s the Moscow Center network.”
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  “Can any device see it?”

  “No way. And you can’t get in without the correct password. It’s twenty-seven characters and hard as rock.”

  “How did you crack it?”

  “It would be impossible to explain.”

  “To a moron like me?”

  “What’s important,” said Ilan, “is that we can add any device into the network we want.” Ilan took the phone from Gabriel. “I’m going to step outside. You watch the laptop.”

  Gabriel did. A moment later, after Ilan had had sufficient time to slip through the iron gate at the end of the drive and make his way across the street, eight words appeared on the screen:

  If she sends a message, we’ll nail her.

  Gabriel deleted the message and tapped a few keys. An encrypted video feed appeared on the screen—a small house, about the size of a typical English cottage, with a peculiar Tudor facade above the portico. At the end of the flagstone walkway stood an iron lamp, and next to the lamp stood a woman. Gabriel thought of the message he had received from his friend Adrian Carter of the CIA. Who’s the lucky girl? If you only knew.

  58

  Tenleytown, Washington

  As Rebecca passed the large colonial house at the corner of Nebraska Avenue and Forty-Second Street, she thought about the day her father had revealed his plan for her. It was summer, she was staying at his little dacha outside Moscow. He and Rufina had presided over a luncheon party for a few close friends. Yuri Modin, his old KGB controller, was there, and so was Sasha. Her father had drunk a great deal of Georgian wine and vodka. Modin had tried to keep pace with him, but Sasha had abstained. “Vodka,” he told Rebecca, not for the last time, “is a Russian curse.”

  In late afternoon they moved into the screened porch to escape the mosquitos, Rebecca and her father, Modin and Sasha. Even now, forty years later, Rebecca could recall the scene with photographic clarity. Modin was seated directly across the wooden table from her, and Sasha was to Modin’s left. Rebecca was next to her father and was leaning her head against his shoulder. Like all his children—and like her mother—she adored him. It was impossible not to.

  “Rebecca, my d-d-darling,” he said with his endearing stutter, “there’s something we need to discuss.”

  Until that moment, Rebecca believed her father was a journalist who lived in a strange, gray country far from her own. But on that day, in the presence of Yuri Modin and Sasha, he told her the truth. He was that Kim Philby, the master spy who had betrayed his country, his class, and his club. He had acted not out of greed but out of faith in an ideal, that workers should not be used as tools, that they should own the means of production, a phrase Rebecca did not yet understand. He only had one regret; he had been forced to defect before completing the task of destroying Western capitalism and the American-led NATO alliance.

  “But you, my precious, you are going to finish the job for me. I can promise you only one thing, you’ll never be bored.”

  Rebecca was never given an opportunity to refuse the life her father had chosen for her, it simply happened. Her mother married an Englishman named Robert Manning, the marriage ended, and her mother returned to France, leaving Rebecca behind in England. As the years passed, she had trouble recalling her mother’s face, but she never forgot the silly game they had played in Paris, when they were poor as church mice. How many steps . . .

  Each summer, Rebecca traveled clandestinely to the Soviet Union for political indoctrination and to see her father. Sasha always took extraordinary care with her movements—a ferry to Holland, a passport change in Germany, another in Prague or Budapest, and then an Aeroflot flight to Moscow. It was her favorite time of the year. She loved Russia, even the grim Russia of the Brezhnev years, and always hated to return to Britain, which at the time was scarcely any better. Gradually, her French accent faded, and by the time she arrived at Trinity College her English was flawless. At Sasha’s direction, however, she made no secret of the fact she spoke fluent French. In the end, it was one of the reasons why MI6 hired her.

  After that, there were no more trips to the Soviet Union, and no contact from her father, but Sasha watched over her always, from afar. Her first overseas posting was Brussels, and it was there, in May 1988, she learned her father had died. Word of his death was flashed to all MI6 stations simultaneously. After reading the telegram, she locked herself in a closet and wept. A colleague found her, an officer who had been in her IONEC class at Fort Monckton. His name was Alistair Hughes.

  “What the devil is wrong with you?” he asked.

  “I’m having a bad day, that’s all.”

  “That time of the month?”

  “Sod off, Alistair.”

  “Did you hear the news? That bastard Philby is dead. Drinks in the canteen to celebrate.”

  Three years later the country to which Kim Philby had devoted his life died, too. Suddenly bereft of their traditional enemy, the intelligence services of the West went in search of new targets to justify their existence. Rebecca used these years of uncertainty to focus relentlessly on advancing her career. At Sasha’s suggestion she studied Arabic, which enabled her to serve on the front lines of the global war on terrorism. Her tenure as Amman Head of Station had been a triumph and had led to her posting to Washington. Now she was just one step away from the ultimate prize—the prize that had eluded her father. She did not consider herself a traitor. Rebecca’s only country was Kim Philby, and she was faithful only to him.

  Her run that morning took her to Dupont Circle and back. Returning to Warren Street, she passed her house twice without going inside. As usual, she drove herself to the embassy and embarked on what turned out to be an uncommonly dull day. For that reason alone, she agreed to have drinks with Kyle Taylor at J. Gilbert’s, a CIA hangout in McLean. Taylor was the chief of the Counterterrorism Center and one of the least discreet officers in all of Langley. Rebecca rarely left a meeting with Taylor without knowing something she shouldn’t.

  On that evening, Taylor was even more loquacious than usual. One drink turned to two, and it was nearly eight by the time Rebecca crossed Chain Bridge and returned to Washington. She took a deliberately lengthy route back to Tenleytown and parked in front of her house. Warren Street was deserted, but as she made her way up the flagstone walk, she had the uncomfortable feeling she was being watched. Turning, she saw nothing to justify her fear, but once inside she discovered unmistakable evidence her home had been entered in her absence. It was the Crombie overcoat tossed carelessly over the back of a wing chair, and the man sitting at the end of her couch in the dark.

  “Hello, Rebecca,” he said calmly as he switched on a lamp. “Don’t be afraid, it’s only me.”

  59

  Warren Street, Washington

  Rebecca filled two tumblers with ice and several ounces of Johnnie Walker Black Label. To her own glass she added a dash of Evian water, but the other she left undiluted. The last thing she needed was another drink, but she welcomed the opportunity to collect herself. It was fortunate she wasn’t carrying her gun; she might very well have shot the director-general of the Secret Intelligence Service. It was upstairs, the gun, in the top drawer of her bedside table, a SIG Sauer 9mm. The Americans knew about the weapon and approved of Rebecca keeping it in her home for protection. She was forbidden, however, to carry it while in public.

  “I was beginning to think you’d fled the country,” Graham Seymour called out from the next room.

  “Kyle Taylor,” explained Rebecca.

  “How was he?”

  “Talkative.”

  “Did he drone anyone today?”

  Rebecca smiled in spite of herself. She knew Kyle Taylor to be a man of relentless career ambition. It was said of Kyle Taylor that he would drone his mother if he thought it would earn him a job on Langley’s cherished seventh floor.

  Rebecca carried the two glasses into the sitting room and handed one to Seymour. He watched her carefully over the rim as she lit an L&B. Her hand was shaking.<
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  “Are you all right?”

  “I will be eventually. How did you get in here?”

  Seymour held up a spare key to Rebecca’s front door. She kept a copy at the station in case of emergency.

  “And your car and driver?” she asked.

  “Around the corner.”

  Rebecca chided herself inwardly for not having taken a pass through the surrounding streets before returning home. She drew heavily on her cigarette and exhaled a lungful of smoke toward the ceiling.

  “Forgive me for not telling you I was coming to town,” Seymour said. “And for dropping in unannounced. But I wanted a word in private, away from the station.”

  “It’s not secure here.” Rebecca nearly choked on the absurdity of her words. No room in the world was secure, she thought, so long as she was in it.

  Seymour handed her his BlackBerry. “Do me a favor and drop this in a Faraday pouch. Yours, too.”

  Faraday pouches blocked incoming and outgoing signals from smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers. Rebecca always kept one in her handbag. She placed Seymour’s BlackBerry into the pouch, along with her own BlackBerry and personal iPhone, and stowed it in the refrigerator. Returning to the sitting room, she found Seymour lighting one of her cigarettes.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, “but I could use one.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “I’m afraid it is. At eleven o’clock tomorrow morning, I’m meeting with Morris Payne at Langley. I will tell Director Payne that my government has obtained definitive proof the SVR was behind Alistair’s murder in Bern.”

  “You told me it was an accident.”

  “It wasn’t. Which is why, at noon tomorrow, our foreign secretary will telephone the secretary of state at Foggy Bottom and deliver a similar message. What’s more, the foreign secretary will tell the secretary of state that the United Kingdom intends to suspend all diplomatic ties with Russia. The prime minister will break the news to the president at one o’clock.”