WESTERN RUSSIA, 150 MILES FROM THE BELARUSIAN BORDER —26 SEPTEMBER

“Luganov’s plane took off two hours ago,” Morris said as she drove.

“Heading east?” Marcus asked as he sipped the coffee she’d brought him in a travel mug.

“Heading east. Pyongyang.”

“Check,” he said, nearly burning his tongue and deciding to wait until the coffee cooled a bit. “What else have you got?”

“Quite a bit,” she said. “NSA has intercepts of communications between various Russian base commanders and logistics officers giving orders that match almost precisely some of the written orders the Raven provided.”

“The Raven?”

“That’s the code name the Agency gave your mole.”

“Randomly generated?”

“Not exactly,” Morris conceded. “When I sent back the eyes-only cable to the director with my write-up of your report, I gave your guy that moniker. Guess it stuck.”

“So why the Raven?”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“Don’t we have like a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the safe house?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I guess we have plenty of time, Agent Morris, don’t we?”

After bouncing around over some rocky terrain, they turned onto a real road, and the ride smoothed out. Morris glanced at him and smiled. “I guess we do,” she said. “But call me Jenny, okay?”

“Jenny —got it. So why the Raven?”

“It’s a biblical reference, actually,” she said, “but don’t tell anyone at Langley. They probably think it has something to do with Edgar Allan Poe.”

“What’s the biblical connection?” Marcus asked.

“The Old Testament tells a story about this prophet named Elijah. He was on the run from a wicked king,” she explained.

“Ahab,” Marcus said.

Morris seemed surprised. “Exactly. Elijah had no food, no water. But God provided for him —led him to a small brook on the east side of the Jordan.”

“And then commanded the ravens to bring him bread and meat each morning and evening,” Marcus added.

“That’s right,” she said. “I guess you know the story.”

“I do,” Marcus said.

“My grandmother taught it to me when I was a little girl,” Morris said as she blew down the desolate country road at more than eighty miles per hour. “She used to say, ‘Jenny, God always knows what we need, and if we’ll just trust him, he’ll provide from the most unlikely of sources.’”

“Like a raven,” said Marcus.

“Like a raven,” she agreed.

Later, as they drove east toward Moscow on the M-9 highway, Marcus asked where she was from.

“I’m afraid that’s classified, Mr. Ryker.” She smiled.

“Call me Marcus, okay?”

“Okay, but it’s still classified.”

“So, you could tell me . . .”

“But then I’d have to kill you,” she finished.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to get in line.”

They laughed. Marcus knew it was Agency protocol for field agents and certainly station chiefs not to reveal personal details. He thought it was probable that Jenny Morris wasn’t even her real name. But whoever she was, and wherever she’d grown up, Marcus now knew she had a grandmother who’d taught her the Scriptures when she was little, and she’d liked those Bible stories. She’d remembered those stories. And all these years later, she was drawing on those stories in a time of great danger.

It was almost three in the morning when the Mercedes SUV pulled to a stop.

The rain had started nearly an hour ago. Thunder rumbled overhead and jagged sticks of lightning stabbed the moonless night sky. Marcus wiped the fog from his window and tried to get his bearings. To one side of the street, he saw a giant crater where an apartment building once stood. Morris pointed to the other side of the street.

“That’s us,” she said. “Ninth floor, apartment 9D. Grab your stuff and meet me in the lobby. I’ll take you up, but I need to park in a garage around the corner.”

“I’ll go with you,” Marcus said.

“No, you go inside and stay dry. I’ll just be a minute.”

There was no point arguing with the woman. She had the same air of authority Marcus remembered from some of the other CIA agents he’d worked with in the Service. So he opened the passenger door, grabbed his rucksack and parachute pack from the back, and dashed inside. As he did, he noticed the number on the side of the building —20 Guryanova Street —and in an instant he knew where he was.

From inside the dry lobby, he looked back at the crater and closed his eyes. He could envision the massive explosion emanating from the basement. He could see the nine-story building teetering at first, then collapsing so quickly that no one could have possibly gotten out in time, especially those who had been sleeping, which would have been nearly everyone.

He had studied the case years before during a Secret Service training class in Beltsville, Maryland. One of his instructors had spent an entire day discussing the series of apartment bombings in Moscow and around Russia that had occurred in the fall of 1999. They’d studied crime-scene photographs. They’d read forensic reports translated from Russian. They’d watched interviews with key participants and even a Frontline documentary on the bombings that had run on PBS. At first Marcus hadn’t seen the crimes as relevant to his protection duties. But the instructor had argued that anyone doing advance work for the president, the VP, or a foreign leader had to consider every possible method of assassination, no matter how bizarre, no matter how unlikely. Sure, a would-be assassin might use poison or a sniper rifle or a suicide vest to take out his subject, if he —or she —could get close enough to the target. But might not the same sick mind choose to kill hundreds or thousands of people in a high-rise apartment building or an office building in order to take out their target?

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the instructor had stressed over and over again, “you’ll never play effective defense unless you truly understand how to play offense. The only way to properly guard your protectee is to think like an assassin. Until you do that —until you get into the mind of evil and see the world through the eyes of a killer —you’ll never know how to counter all possible moves.”

The apartment bombings had never been solved, Marcus recalled. And apparently, at least one of the buildings had never been rebuilt —the one directly across this very street. Russian authorities had blamed the attacks on Chechen terrorists, but Marcus’s instructor was unconvinced. “Look at the evidence,” he’d said. “The bombs were made with military-grade explosives available only to the government. We know that not only from analysis of the bombs that exploded but also from the unexploded ordnance found by police in an apartment building in Ryazan.”

Marcus remembered asking his instructor who else could have done it. In the fall of 1999, it had certainly seemed like the Chechens were to blame. Every Russian was already horrified by the atrocities going on in Chechnya. But looking back, the instructor had asked a simple but profound question: Who benefited from the bombings? Certainly not the Chechens. Grozny was carpet-bombed that very month. There was, however, someone who did benefit. Who was it who had stepped into the spotlight in the wake of the apartment bombings? Who went on TV to very publicly order the Russian invasion of Chechnya? Who saw his name ID soar, and his approval ratings with it? Who but Aleksandr Luganov, the Russian prime minister and former head of the FSB, a man who not only had access to the explosives used in the bombings but also clearly benefited in the aftermath.

Lo and behold, once Luganov had ordered the bombing of Chechen cities, the apartment bombings suddenly stopped. Luganov was elected president of Russia soon after. Was it really possible, Marcus had wondered so long ago, that Luganov had ordered some of his loyalists to blow up Russian apartment buildings so that innocent Russians would die and he could blame it on the Chechens, order retaliation against Chechnya, and see his approval ratings soar into the stratosphere so he could be elected the new czar of Russia? It had all seemed rather far-fetched at the time. Yet what would the people of eastern Georgia say now? Or those who lived in Crimea? Or eastern Ukraine or Syria?

Five minutes later they reached the ninth floor. Jenny Morris unlocked the door to the three-bedroom apartment and hung her soaking-wet coat in a shower stall. Marcus tossed his stuff in one of the bedrooms and headed back out into the hallway.

“Where are you going?” Morris asked as she dried her hair with a towel.

“The basement,” he said. “I just want to check things out, make sure no one has left a present for us. Don’t worry. I won’t be long.”