Lucy was spooning the last of a carton of apple sauce through Marge Goldberg’s quavering lips when a familiar face appeared at the main entrance. Gently, she wiped Marge’s mouth, and then went to greet him.
“Hello, Congressman!”
Bryce Ridgeway smiled broadly. “Hey, Lucy. Good to see you.”
“I’m so glad you made it in—life must be crazy busy for you these days.”
“You can’t imagine. How’s Dad?”
“Oh, about the same. Good days and bad.”
“I’d like to ask a favor. It’s his birthday next week and I’m going to be out of town. I know it’s getting late, but I was hoping to take him out to dinner, then maybe for some ice cream—you know, that place down the street he likes.”
“Oh, right. I know you’ve taken him there before.” She checked her watch—seven o’clock. It was rare to take a resident out this late, but they weren’t running a prison. And if you can’t trust a guy like Bryce Ridgeway to take his father out for ice cream …
Lucy said, “I’m sure he’d love it! Come on, he’s in his room. We’ll have to get him ready.”
Ten minutes later, the congressman was completing the sign-out log at the front desk.
Walter was in a wheelchair, and Lucy snugged up the zipper on his jacket. He looked befuddled, but calm. She turned to his son, and said, “Do you need help out to the car?”
“No, I can manage. We’ll be back in an hour or two.”
“Okay, I’m going off shift soon, so I may miss you.”
“No problem. Thanks for everything, Lucy—I’ll see you next time.”
She watched Ridgeway wheel his father toward a sedan at the far end of the nearly empty lot. After helping him into the passenger seat, he returned the wheelchair to the portico. Catching Lucy’s gaze, he gave her a broad smile.
The man playing Bryce climbed behind the wheel. Walter, sitting next to him, stared straight ahead. As they drove past the entrance, the candidate waved to Lucy, who was still watching. At the main road he turned right. A hundred yards farther on, he pulled into the empty parking lot of a medical complex that was shuttered for the night.
Walter turned to face him, and said, “God, that place is getting on my nerves.”
His infirmity had vaporized. He still wore his eighty years, but his blue eyes were clear, his stooped posture straighter. He said in flawless Russian, “Tell me the latest, Sergei.”
The younger man had to smile. He had not heard his true name since leaving Russia, nearly a year ago now. Even then it had been used sparingly, a consequence of the immersion training he’d undergone since childhood. A lifetime of preparation that was finally, stunningly reaching its payoff.
“Sarah’s suspicions have advanced,” he said. “I made every effort to minimize contact with her, but that strategy had its limits. To spend too much time away—that would have been suspicious in its own right. We always knew she presented the biggest risk.”
“Along with the girl.”
“Alyssa was easier. Teenage girls rarely seek time with their parents. Unfortunately, my sudden fame brought a rise in her own popularity. She parades me in front of her friends every chance she gets. I hadn’t predicted that.”
Walter said nothing.
“There is another complication. Sarah confided her concerns with someone else—someone who’s proved exceptionally adept at digging into backgrounds.”
“The FBI agent you mentioned?”
“No, he doesn’t worry me,” said Sergei. “It’s Sarah’s best friend, Claire. Apparently, she is some kind of government researcher, an expert at cyber surveillance. I suspect she’s the one who uncovered the condo.”
“Did Gregor deal with it?”
“Burned to the ground. It will look suspicious, but the ownership is well hidden. It can’t lead anywhere.”
“How will you deal with Sarah?”
“There was only ever going to be one way. It simply came sooner than expected.”
“Natalia?” Walter asked. Natalia Volkov was their lone liaison at the embassy. Sultry-voiced and lethal, she was the only one with knowledge of the operation who held formal diplomatic status.
“No, she has returned to Moscow. Even if she were here, we couldn’t risk using an embassy asset. Colonel Radanov wanted to bring in a special SVR team. I told him no.”
“You denied Radanov? The man who built the program?”
A satisfied smile. “He could hardly argue—I am soon to be the most powerful man on earth.” Sergei’s phone buzzed with a text. He read it, then began an extended back-and-forth.
Walter watched him closely. He seemed so familiar, yet was of course a stranger—not the young man he’d molded meticulously for thirty-five years. Walter had raised Bryce Ridgeway since infancy. Guided him as a child, sent him to the best schools, ensured he studied the right subjects. They’d had their differences like any “father and son.” In truth, more than most given the elder’s controlling instincts and the younger’s stubbornness. The first major dustup involved marriage. Walter had hoped to steer Bryce toward a suitable union: a girl with money, pedigree, maybe a little political ambition of her own. Instead, he’d fallen for Sarah at Princeton. Walter had viewed their engagement critically, in part because they were so young, but also because he recognized Sarah for what she was—a smart and determined woman who might eventually create problems. Now those old worries were proving spot-on.
The greater disaster came when Bryce joined the Army. Walter had fought tooth and nail against it, trying to persuade Bryce that he could serve America far more effectively by attending a top law school, and thereafter going into government, rather than fighting jihadis on the front lines. He might as well have been talking to a stone wall. For reasons Walter never understood, the child he’d raised in the lap of privilege had turned into a patriot, a true believer in America.
Contradicting the destiny Bryce knew nothing about, it was an irony for the ages.
Never losing sight of the endgame, Walter allowed that if the boy never became a senator, he might at least reach a high rank in the Army. Radanov, certainly, could do something with that. Then fate had intervened. Bryce suffered injuries that forced him to leave the service. And there, finally, Walter had seen one last chance. Reluctantly, Bryce agreed to run for office, a telegenic veteran who won his congressional seat by a landslide. With that, the plan that was a lifetime in the making not only fell back on track, but transformed to exceed even Radanov’s wildest dreams.
Walter’s conversion had begun early in his diplomatic career, a combination of youthful recklessness and doctrinal ambiguity. A secure cable leaked in Paris, a meeting reported from Munich. On the surface, he was a young diplomat who talked a hard line against the Soviets. Deep down, however, his sympathies had long wavered. What began as ideological support for the communists graduated to receiving direct payments from them. Slowly, insidiously, a cavalier sympathizer morphed into a beholden agent. As Walter rose in the State Department, the KGB loosened its grip, watching and waiting. Their biggest move, as it turned out, came when he took over the mission in Prague. Marsha had been pining for a child, yet they’d been unable to conceive. Ever the opportunist, Radanov had learned of it and played his ace perfectly: the insertion into America of a sleeper agent like no other. The Ridgeways raised the child as their own. Over time, with the fall of the Soviets and the rise of the oligarchs, Walter’s sympathies toward Russia declined. Only later was he told the rest of the plan. The boy would someday be replaced. By then, of course, it was hopeless—with the depths of his treason bottomless, Walter was fully committed.
Now he sat looking at a man he barely knew. One whose entire upbringing had been tailored for this moment.
Sergei ended his text exchange. “Sarah has been isolated. She’s across the state line, in West Virginia.”
“How will you do it?”
“I devised a contingency plan months ago—it’s based on photographs from the condo. I only have to draw Sarah to the right place.”
“How did you convince her to come?”
“The girl, of course.”
Walter straightened. “You have Alyssa? Is that necessary?”
“You know it was inevitable.”
“Where is she now?”
“Gregor is watching her.”
Walter recoiled. He’d never liked the SVR man. But then, one didn’t get to choose one’s control officer. Gregor also provided Sergei’s logistical support.
Sergei gestured up the road. “They are a few miles ahead. We will reunite the girl with her mother soon.”
“It’s too bad,” Walter lamented. “As a granddaughter, I rather liked her.”
“I might have warmed to her myself, given time. Unfortunately, raising children was never part of my curriculum.”
The old man shook his head as if clearing out doubts. “No, of course—both of them.”
“That was always the plan. I could not have fooled them forever.”
“You’re sure it can be done cleanly?”
“Trust me, I’ve given this great thought,” said the ersatz son. “Their tragedy will become my gain.”
“How so?”
Sergei grinned. “Come November, America’s voters will weep tears of sympathy as they blacken the circle next to my name.”
The weather was beginning to break when the helicopter arrived at The Dacha. The pilots were equipped with night vision gear, and the Hind was fully instrumented for flight in adverse weather. Even so, the wind was gusting, and low layers of cloud obscured much of the coastline.
The aircraft commander brought the Hind to a hover over the coordinates they’d been given. Unfortunately, the undercast was so solid he saw no sign of the building in question. The nearest break in the clouds was a mile west along the shoreline, and after circling the area twice he set down above the tideline on a broad gravel delta. The eight commandos in back, all in full combat rig, bundled out, organized, and set out on a steady run.
The captain in command got his first glimpse of the building minutes later. From a distance it looked simple enough—solid and square, the size of a residential home. He’d been briefed to expect no threat, yet the fact that his team had been called out was reason enough to think otherwise. That wariness ratcheted up considerably when the captain nearly stepped on a body outside the front door: a big man splayed on his back, covered in an inch of fresh snow.
He’d been told that only one prisoner was being held inside. Even so, seeing a closed front door and a dead man with a hatchet protruding from his chest, the captain was rightly cautious. Using hand signals to order the breach, he was the first man through the door, and a textbook clearing operation took less than a minute. At that point the commander lowered his weapon and initiated a call to headquarters using his tactical sat-phone. His report was every bit as concise as the clearing op: four bodies, no sign of the detainee.
While the captain took new orders, his men watched him guardedly. When the call ended, the senior NCO said, “Let me guess. Now we’re supposed to find him?”
“We are. And we’re going to get some help—apparently an entire brigade. By midday today, there will be more soldiers on this peninsula than seabirds.” With that, the captain headed outside to organize the search.
Colonel Radanov had been on the other end of the call, and for the first time since being shaken out of a sound sleep, hours earlier, he truly began to worry. Yesterday he’d been on the cusp of the greatest espionage coup of all time.
And today? The rate at which it was unraveling seemed to double by the minute.
He now faced problems on two fronts.
The first had been brewing for days—the suspicious wife of Bryce Ridgeway. He’d assumed this to be a manageable difficulty. Indeed, one they would have to face eventually. Following his insertion, Sergei had done his best to keep a distance from those who knew Bryce Ridgeway best. He’d fired Mandy Treanor without consequence, and avoided certain friends on Capitol Hill. Marital distancing, however, was more problematic. Radanov knew the day would come when Sarah Ridgeway and her daughter became suspicious—they would recognize too many differences in Sergei. He’d hoped it wouldn’t reach criticality until after the election. Now that it had, however, he was convinced that if the two could be eliminated convincingly, the problem might turn in their favor.
The issue of the real Bryce Ridgeway escaping was something else altogether: that was an unmitigated disaster. Radanov had regularly watched the interrogation videos, so he knew the man was in terrible shape. Still, the fact that he’d overpowered four SVR officers, then bolted out into a snowstorm, said something about Ridgeway. He was a soldier, a fighter. This Radanov had forgotten.
Now everything came down to the next few hours.
Sergei and Gregor could contain things in America.
Yet if Ridgeway couldn’t be captured, if he somehow managed to reach the West … the greatest espionage triumph of all time would turn into the most profound failure.
And Radanov, after surviving so many decades of intelligence work, had no doubt who would be held responsible.