First stop, Las Vegas.
Rebecca caught the early-morning United nonstop from Dulles to LAX, walked through Terminal 7 looking for a flight to McCarran. By ten thirty she was in a cab on Tropicana Avenue, headed for Silver State Gaming Consultants, the company that had bought Brian’s app.
Her ride stopped beside a two-story office building. Just down the block was the Pinball Hall of Fame. Only fitting. She was on tilt for sure. She handed the driver a twenty, stepped out. A check of state corporate records showed that Silver State Gaming had been in business for thirty years. Still, she wanted to see its offices for herself. Both to make sure it wasn’t a shell and see if she could pick up what the bureau liked to call “soft intel.”
In retrospect maybe she should have asked more questions when Brian sold the app. But the deal had come together fast, and the idea someone would pay Brian seven figures for a successful application hardly seemed crazy. She’d read about Candy Crush, how the company that made it was worth billions.
When Brian showed her the app, she could see why people would want to use it and casinos would advertise on it. It had lots of tips about games and even directed users to the quote-unquote hottest slot machines. The play games it offered could easily be turned into real-money versions if the federal government legalized Internet gambling. Like Hollywood, Brian said. Millions of scripts, but most of ’em suck. Write a good one, people notice.
Plus the download numbers, twenty-one thousand, had seemed solid to her at the time. Brian said even more important was how quickly they were going up, how much people used the app after they downloaded it, was it what developers called “sticky”? Truth is maybe I’d be better off waiting, but I don’t want this thing to take over my life, he said. Two million, not bad.
Even the fact the offer had come out of nowhere hadn’t bothered her as much as maybe it should have. She knew Brian had gone to that casino industry conference. And her focus had been elsewhere. She’d been investigating two congressional aides for helping a Russian bank evade sanctions—not exactly espionage, but close. An important case.
Later, she’d wondered once or twice when he’d found the time to write it. When she wandered down to the basement at night, he was usually watching ESPN or Hong Kong martial arts movies. Then again he’d won that NSA challenge. He was smarter than he liked to admit. Maybe smarter than she liked to admit. His problem had always been his attitude.
She could see now she’d felt ashamed for doubting him in so many ways. She assumed his secrecy about the app only proved how lousy their marriage had become. She dropped her usual skepticism, played cheerleader instead. Soon enough the deal was done. Brian hired a lawyer in Vegas to review the contract, flew out two more times. Then they were rich. Rich enough, anyway. A million, with another million the next year. She never even met anyone at Silver State Gaming. You can if you like but they’re pretty boring, Brian had said. Not worth the flight.
The contract did have one condition she found odd: A non-disclosure agreement. They weren’t supposed to tell anyone that Brian had written Twenty-One. Brian said Silver State Gaming didn’t want anyone to know that it hadn’t created the app itself.
But don’t you want credit, Rebecca said. Maybe you’d get more business.
Credit’s fine. Two million dollars is better.
Okay, but you’ll have to tell the NSA, and I have to tell the bureau. They’ll want to know where the money’s coming from.
I’ll make sure the non-disclosure section has an exemption for our jobs, Brian said. And he had. They disclosed the deal on their financial disclosures, and neither the bureau nor the NSA seemed to care much. She’d only had one lie detector test since the sale—the polygraph examiners were notoriously overbooked. The examiner hadn’t even asked about the money.
Otherwise, Rebecca had stuck to the non-disclosure agreement, which looked to her now like a way to help her forget the app. As in fact she had. She hadn’t checked it in years. She had no idea if she ever would have again, had Kira not happened to mention the Encore.
Of course, the fact that the app had fallen into a state of quasi-disrepair didn’t prove anything, not by itself. Maybe other companies had made their own, better versions. Maybe now that gamblers could bet online for real money in states like New Jersey, they had decided they trusted the big casino companies more.
But there were other clues. The size of the ransom demand, which now seemed less like coincidence than a coded message to Brian. The way he had frozen when she mentioned that fact to him on the train. His nervousness the first night before they knew anything was wrong, so unlike his personality. The way he’d insisted since the kidnapping that they shouldn’t push the investigation.
Most of all, she’d always believed Jacques had targeted Kira, that the kidnapping wasn’t random. But she’d never understood why, never really convinced herself Jacques planned to sell Kira. That version of the story was too tabloid. And the kidnappers had been so much better trained than a typical gang. Even their response to Kira’s escape had been professional. They’d shut the operation down and vanished. No hard feelings, no grudges. Game over.
So. Her husband had pissed off the Russians, and they’d used Kira to send him a message. Why? She could guess.
One thing she knew about Brian, the man always wanted something for nothing, always thought he was better than the bargain he’d made.
Yeah, she had an inside line on this case.
She’d learned over the years to trust her gut on complicated investigations, the moment the answer came into focus. Sometimes intuition outran evidence. But she knew the danger of relying on intuition, too. When it was wrong, innocent people wound up in prison.
She needed proof. So here she was.
The office building on Tropicana Avenue was dated, seventies-style, white cladding and black glass. Silver State Gaming Consultants was in Suite 212. Rebecca marched up the stairs. Just another investigation. Lock down the facts, then move forward.
The office behind the wooden door of Suite 212 looked real enough. A secretary out front, a corridor that led to half a dozen offices. Voices on phones, Okay, lunch, then, the chatter of business. On the wall behind the secretary, framed photos from industry journals. Silver State Gaming picked to market Henderson’s first casino-brewery! They mostly featured pictures of a ruddy, chubby guy in his sixties who wore a cowboy hat and an I’d never cheat ya grin. Rebecca had to be honest with herself: he couldn’t have looked less like a Russian operative.
“Can I help you?” The secretary was in her fifties, bottle-blond hair and electric-blue fingernails.
Rebecca handed over a résumé, Tracy McDaniel, a freelance web designer looking for full-time work.
“Too bad you weren’t here last month. We just hired somebody.”
Rebecca smiled. “That is too bad. I’m Tracy. I mean, obviously.”
“Linda.”
“Nice to meet you. Just moved here from Buffalo, papering the walls. I know everybody says Indeed and LinkedIn are all you need, but I feel better getting out.”
“Buffalo? Like New York?”
“Yeah, done with those winters. Mind if I ask, do your Web work in-house?”
Linda nodded. “Our specialty. We help independent casinos with marketing. The places the locals go, not the Strip.”
Rebecca pointed at the framed photos.
“That’s the man in charge? Carl James?”
Linda lowered her voice. “To be honest, we keep the photos up, but Mr. James had a stroke a few years back. He’s in a wheelchair, doesn’t come in much anymore. His daughter and son-in-law run the company. Joanna and Fred.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that. Anyway, if you could please pass along my résumé—”
“Will do.”
She started with real estate records. Carl James turned out to be that rarest of birds, a Las Vegas lifer. He lived in a house valued at a million-five in a gated community in Summerlin, west of downtown. He was long divorced and had two kids, Joanna and Michael.
Michael’s last known address was in Eugene, Oregon. He had cycled through jails since his early twenties, arrests for vandalism and petty theft and narcotics possession, the sad litany of a wasted life. Joanna had a marketing degree from the University of Southern California and three kids. She lived close to her father in a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar house. Silver State Gaming Consultants must make pretty good money. Its corporate records listed her as the company’s treasurer.
Rebecca had a hard time seeing either Joanna or Michael as a Russian agent. As for Joanna’s husband, she couldn’t find much about him on the Internet. His name, Frank Brown, was all too common. Nothing popped. No arrests, no convictions. No LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram pages. No record of where he’d gone to college, no family members listed. And he stayed in the background at Silver State Gaming.
Frank was so boring he was interesting. For him she needed some law enforcement databases.
Back to Los Angeles. Lucky her, working counterintel meant she could show up at any bureau office and not face turf battles or sticky questions. She flashed her identification, asked for an empty office, a secure one.
Ten minutes later she was looking at Brown’s driver’s license records to find his date of birth—May 31, 1975—and make sure he shared Joanna’s address.
Turned out he’d had a New York license before Nevada.
That fast she struck gold. 287 Brighton 4th Street, Apt 5G, Brooklyn, New York—
Brighton 4th Street?
As in Brighton Beach, also known as Little Odessa because so many Russians lived there? What exactly had Frank Brown been doing in Brighton Beach?
Then again, maybe he hadn’t always been Frank Brown.
Name change records were public. In fact, New York State required them to be published. And there it was, in the New York Law Journal, the words dry and bureaucratic, hiding their secret in plain sight:
“Notice is hereby given that an order entered by the Civil Court, Kings County… grants me the right to assume the name of Frank Brown, the date of my birth is May 31, 1975, the place of my birth is Moscow, Russia, my present name is Fyodor Borodiev.”
The place of my birth is Moscow, Russia…
How could he?
She was glad she had an office to herself. She found herself shaking her head at the absurdity of it. Follow that pronoun, Officer! Not Fyodor, she knew exactly how Fyodor could have done what he did. He’d gone to the courthouse, filled out the forms, just as someone in Moscow had told him to do, We don’t know when we’ll need you, but one day we will, and when we do you’ll be more useful to us if your name isn’t Fyodor—
Forget Fyodor.
He was Brian Unsworth, her lawfully wedded husband.
How could he have let Kira suffer? Knowing they’d taken her to punish him. Because he’d told them he wouldn’t spy for them anymore unless they gave him more money, or more respect, or more women, whatever it was that his desperate insecurities demanded.
But he had. He’d let them steal his daughter. And if she hadn’t freed herself—
Time to close the loop. Rebecca logged into the bank account she and Brian shared, scrolled until she found what she was looking for. The great advantage of investigating your spouse, so much less paperwork.
She reached for the phone, then stopped herself. She needed to have this conversation in person, which meant another trip to Las Vegas. It would have to wait for the morning.
Instead she called Brian. Let him see she really was in Los Angeles.
“Miss me?”
“The pain is unimaginable, Becks. You’ve been gone a full fifteen hours.”
He sounded the same as ever.
How could he?
“I think we should move to California. It’s seventy-eight degrees here.”
“Trip good?”
“Yeah, I’m finding what I came for.” You have no idea. “Anyway, see you tomorrow night, if you need me I’ll be at the Hampton Inn in Hollywood, I’ll text the number.”
“Classy.”
“Government rate. Kiss Tony for me.”
“I will not.”
“Love you.”
“Love you too, babe.”
Since the kidnapping, he called her babe. Since the kidnapping, they said they loved each other. They were closer than they’d been in years. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe this was just a bizarre coincidence.
Yeah right.
The next morning, 8:30 a.m., she stood outside the Bank of Nevada on South Durango Drive. The wire transfer to the bank account she shared with Brian had come from this branch. She carried a national security letter asking for the financial records of Silver State Gaming Consultants.
Now she was breaking the law, no way around it. She had never before abused her power as an agent this way, never come close to crossing a legal line like this. The letter was simple enough, no different from a dozen others she’d written. It ordered the bank to provide her with access to Silver State Gaming’s accounts: “I certify that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence operations…”
Honestly, she didn’t love using national security letters. The FBI really should come up with a warrant before poking around in financial or email records that belonged to Americans. But the Justice Department had argued that because the records related to internationally focused investigations, they didn’t deserve full constitutional protection. In legalese, national security letters were known as “administrative subpoenas.” Just like a regular subpoena, without the pesky need to convince an independent federal judge that it was necessary.
Even better—or worse, from the point of view of constitutional protections and privacy—the letters forbade the company that had received them from disclosing their existence to the target. In other words, the person being investigated didn’t even have a chance to respond.
Of course, real warrants worked the same way—telling a criminal target his house or business was about to be searched obviously didn’t make sense. Again, though, a judge had signed those warrants, after a law enforcement agency presented probable cause of a crime. That standard didn’t apply here. The FBI simply had to “certify” that what it was looking for might be “relevant.”
Regardless, the letters were constitutional, or so friendly federal judges had agreed. The bureau used them all the time. In truth, Rebecca could have persuaded the FBI lawyers who oversaw them to sign off on this one. By the standards of national security letters, the fact that a guy born in Russia had changed his name and funneled two million dollars to a National Security Agency employee was plenty.
Only problem was that Rebecca couldn’t ask. For the first time in her career, she was running an off-the-books investigation. Thus every word in the letter was correct, except one: authorized.
Still, she should be safe. The letter specifically prohibited anyone at Bank of Nevada from disclosing its existence. No one would ever find out. And as long as no one ever found out…
She wondered how many people she’d arrested had told themselves the same story.
The big blue Bank of Nevada logo gave the branch a slightly glitzy look. Maybe people here subconsciously associated money with casinos, needed a reason to stick cash in the bank.
Inside, though, the branch looked like any other. Rebecca flashed her identification to the woman behind the counter. “The manager, please.” The teller picked up her phone. An FBI badge carried even more weight in a bank than most places.
The manager was in her early thirties. She wore a trim gray suit, a less fancy version of Rebecca’s Theory set. Light makeup. A no-nonsense haircut. A bit younger than Rebecca expected. Rebecca didn’t know if her age would make her easier to impress or more likely to push back.
“Rebecca Unsworth.” She flashed her badge.
“Liz Crandall.” The manager looked around. “Is your partner outside?”
Smart question. Crandall knew FBI agents usually worked in pairs. Her willingness to question Rebecca from the first suggested she might not accept the letter on faith. Rebecca would need to take control of this conversation quickly.
“No partner. I’m here from D.C. Can we speak in private, Ms. Crandall?”
Crandall’s office was next to the entrance to the vault. No personal pictures, not even a motivational poster. All business.
Rebecca closed the door as they entered, pulled the letter from her briefcase. Making Crandall feel like a partner would be the play. “Don’t know if you’ve seen anything like this before. Most people haven’t. It’s called a national security letter. We use them when we’re investigating terrorism or espionage, targets with a non-US focus.”
“This is about terrorism?” Crandall’s voice rose slightly on the last word.
“I can’t tell you more than what’s in the letter. I will say if you call D.C., they’ll tell you I run the Russia counterintelligence desk.”
“Counterintelligence. Like spying?”
“Espionage, yes.”
Finally, Crandall seemed impressed. She took the letter, read it slowly. When she was done, Rebecca reached for it. Crandall hesitated.
“Shouldn’t I hold on to it?”
“Ms. Crandall, there are two ways to do this. You have every right to keep it, and in that case I expect you’ll want to send a copy to your headquarters, lawyers, et cetera. And Bank of Nevada has every right to contest this letter on behalf of Silver State. Though they’d probably want to hire outside counsel, as these are specialized cases. To be honest, I’m not even sure there’s a lawyer in Las Vegas who’s handled one. It’s an expensive process. Also slow. And this investigation is developing rapidly”—true enough—“which is why I’m here.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”
“A delay could harm the investigation. The other possibility, we simply look right now.”
“You mean I—”
Crandall broke off.
“Yes, just pull up the file. I will tell you this, I am looking for something specific, and it shouldn’t take long to find if it’s there.”
“Can I see your ID again?”
The room seemed hotter and colder at once. Was this how the folks Rebecca went after felt when they knew they’d screwed up? But she could hardly take off, the branch had cameras in every corner. She handed over her identification.
“Mind if I ask the main number? For the FBI in Washington?”
“202-324-3000.”
Crandall punched it in.
“Yes, I’m looking for the counterintelligence division— Sure, I can hold.”
What are you doing?
The silence must have lasted only a few seconds, but it felt far longer.
“Yes, I’d like to talk to someone who works there, Rebecca Unsworth.” Pause. “She’s not? I don’t suppose you can tell me— No, I understand.” A long pause. “No, no, it has to be her. Does she have voice mail? Thanks.”
Crandall hit the speaker button, and after a few seconds of silence Rebecca heard her own voice: You’ve reached Rebecca Unsworth, please leave a message—
Crandall hung up.
“Wanted to be sure I wasn’t an imposter?”
Crandall shrugged, Better safe than sorry.
“Bold. What if I had been?” Rebecca smiled. “You should come work for us.”
“Come on, I’ll pull the records, give you some privacy so you can check what you need.”
An hour later Rebecca was back at McCarran, flashing her badge to skip the endless security line. Working for the bureau had a few privileges.
What she’d found wasn’t exactly what she’d expected, but it was enough.
In the months leading up to the two million-dollar transfers, the Silver State Gaming account received dozens of cash deposits between twenty and seventy thousand dollars each. In all, they had totaled $2.9 million.
Are cash deposits unusual? she’d asked Crandall afterward.
Not really. It’s Vegas. Might be as simple as the guy plays a high-stakes poker game. I mean, we tell them we’re going to report the deposits, and we do. But they aren’t illegal. After that, it’s between them and the IRS.
Which explained the extra nine hundred thousand. The Russians had wanted the payment to be odorless start to finish. They could hardly expect Frank Brown to be stuck paying taxes on money he was just passing along.
Two-point-nine million dollars. Far more than Rebecca had ever heard of the Russians paying anyone else. But then Bri was uniquely well-positioned, wasn’t he? Not only did he work for the most secretive, highest-value unit at the NSA, his wife ran counterintel against them.
She found an empty chair and watched the tourists waddle by, muttering about craps and the slots and blackjack. How they should have quit when they were ahead.
You have no idea.
No wonder the Russians had gone to such lengths to punish Brian, to force him back to work. But once Kira was kidnapped…
He could have saved her. As soon as he told Rebecca, the FBI would have told the SVR, Let her go or reap the whirlwind. They would have meant it, too. And the SVR would have blamed a rogue team and let Kira walk in five minutes. No way would they have wanted that fight.
But Brian would have paid the price. He’d be sharing a cellblock with Aldrich Ames the rest of his life.
Instead he’d kept his mouth shut. Probably he’d gone to the Russians instead, promised to go back to work if they cut her loose. Which might explain how Kira had gotten out of that closet. Though Rebecca still wasn’t sure, maybe Kira had taken Rodrigo down all by herself—
What mattered, all that mattered: Brian had let Kira swing when he could have saved her.
The Russians must have figured he would, too. Figured when the chips were down he would look out for himself first.
She could almost forgive her husband for betraying his country. And her. Because she knew now, every question he asked her about her work was strategic, information for his paymasters. Maybe every touch and kiss and smile too. All to take her secrets.
She could almost forgive him everything he’d done.
Not really, but she could pretend she might.
But she could never forgive him for betraying their daughter.
He had to pay. She wanted him to pay.
So what now?
Option A: Go to the director and the general counsel this very day, tell them what she knew. Let the bureau take over. The legally correct choice. The morally correct choice. What she’d been trained to do.
Only her career would be over. Not just because she’d forever be famous as the counterintel officer too dumb to have known her husband was a Russian spy. But because of what she’d done today. Any investigation would go straight through Silver State Gaming and the Bank of Nevada, and Liz Crandall was not likely to forget this morning’s chat.
Ahh but if Crandall disappeared—Rebecca laughed loudly enough that a guy wearing a Bellagio T-shirt stared at her. She really was thinking like a perp. Witness in the way? Just get rid of her. No problem that another crime couldn’t fix.
So yeah, telling the FBI would be an instant career-ender.
Maybe she could live with that humiliation. Maybe she even deserved it. But she couldn’t live with what the truth would do to Kira. Because Kira would put the pieces together too, the fact that she’d been taken to punish Brian.
Even worse, Kira wouldn’t think of herself anymore as a survivor who had escaped on her own. She would assume Brian had cut some deal to get her out. Rebecca was almost sure the main reason Kira had put her life back together so fast was because her escape had given her back her agency, made her the hero of the story, not a victim. Instead, she’d just be the daughter of a traitor.
Option A: not so great.
Option B: Keep her mouth shut for now. In a year or two, tip the NSA anonymously. Her career would still be over, of course. And in the meantime Brian would keep doing damage. And after he was arrested Kira would probably still put the pieces together.
Option B, maybe even worse than Option A.
Option C: Keep her mouth shut. Forever. Which would be fine. Except that Brian would keep on selling out his country to the Russians. Worse, Rebecca would be complicit. Worse—worser, was worser even a word?—if he ever did get caught, and the investigators talked to Liz Crandall, they’d realize Rebecca had known. Hey, maybe she and Bri wind up sharing a cell.
Option C, a new low.
Which left Option D. Which was so foreign to her she could think of it only in flashes, not words, much less complete sentences, much less a plan.
The father of her children. Her husband. The only man she’d been with for more than twenty years.
Kill him.
The thought went against everything she knew.
And she couldn’t imagine murdering anyone in cold blood. Self-defense, him or me, okay, maybe. But premeditated murder?
Not even Brian, not even now.
Yeah, put a pin in Option D.
There had to be another way. An Option E. But she couldn’t think of one.
She flew back to Los Angeles, and then she flew home, and she spent the next ten days in a haze.
She told Brian the FBI was looking for the Russian mole at the CIA, just to see what he’d say. Probably a mistake. Though he didn’t seem to care much. She thought about putting a tracker on his car. Snooping software on his phone or computer was definitely out, he’d find it before she even finished installing it.
Mainly she waited, hoping another alternative would suggest itself. None did. Paralysis by analysis. For the first time in her life she understood why people did nothing at all in the face of bad news, how they ignored the foreclosure letter from the bank, the glassine envelope in their kid’s backpack, the call from the doctor, We really need to talk about those biopsy results.
How about not, how about we just hope they go away?
Then Brian suggested the trip.