“That was great,” Kath said, after Komarovsky had left. “Good idea to plant that seed of skepticism. The rumor-as-disinformation thing.”
Amanda collapsed into her chair. She felt shapeless and limp, like a deflated balloon. Kath tidied up, rinsing their coffee mugs, humming to herself. He’s working for Moscow, Komarovsky had said. He has a direct line to the Kremlin. Amanda wasn’t quite sure what this feeling was—fatigue, sadness, fear—but it was awful. In her mind she saw tsunamis crashing into placid shores. How could a thing so heavy arrive so quickly?
He’ll never forgive me, she thought. When she was twenty-two, and newly returned from her world travels, chastened by what happened in Thailand, haunted by what happened in Russia, she sought her godfather’s advice about what she was planning to do next. Maurice said that her instinct was correct, that it was a good idea, that she would make a good spy. This pleased her—it was rare for the elliptical Maurice to give such direct advice—but still, she took it with a grain of salt. “I guess you can’t really know, though,” she’d said. “I think I could be good at it, but he probably thought the same thing.”
“Your father, you mean? I think he had very different reasons for joining the agency. It was mostly because his own father before him had done this. And he wanted to impress him.”
She remembered thinking, even at the time, even at the age of twenty-two, that impressing one’s father didn’t seem like a wise rubric for making decisions. But right now, in this situation, the wisdom or non-wisdom of it didn’t matter. Because if Charlie believed in this rubric (and wasn’t the very nature of his request to her evidence of that belief?), that was enough to guarantee this whole thing would end badly. There were two doors. Behind one was a treasonous daughter; behind the other was a treasonous spy. She lifted her head. “It’s a game,” she said. “It’s rigged. Either way I lose.”
Drying her hands on a tea towel, Kath shrugged. “We’ll see.”
“No, seriously. I just had an epiphany. I’m fucked. Either way I’m fucked.”
“Is that really how you feel?”
“How else could I feel?”
Kath shrugged again. “Okay. So you’re fucked. So now what?”
“It’s like, it doesn’t matter what I do.”
“Right. And I repeat. Now what?”
“I don’t know.” After a pause: “You got one of those old cyanide pills handy?”
Kath smiled. Then she began to laugh. Amanda, to her surprise, began to laugh, too.
They paused their work with Komarovsky over the holidays. He and his family were spending Christmas in Gstaad. Kath was headed to an undisclosed tropical location. Amanda was planning on a quiet stretch of catch-up in Rome before they reconvened in January.
She unlocked the door to her apartment. In the weeks of her absence, it had acquired an alien air. The bare walls and lone bowl on the draining board sparked the same question as did those frumpy pantsuits inside her carry-on: Who was the person who thought this was a good idea?
It occurred to her that she could do something about this. Then it occurred to her that maybe she should.
On Christmas, she FaceTimed with Georgia. After being passed around to say hello to every single member of the sprawling Markopolous clan, Amanda said: “Okay, so. I need your help.”
After describing what she needed, she said apologetically, “I know it’s a lot,” but Georgia replied: “Amanda Margaret Cole, you just shut the fuck up. This is literally my dream come true.” Within days, the boxes began to arrive. Amanda had wanted to surrender the decisions entirely to Georgia, but Georgia said: “Nope. We’re gonna teach a woman to fish.” Express shipping was expensive, but it was Amanda’s credit card, so who cared? Georgia picked out a few things to start, shirts and sweaters and shoes and dresses. Once she tried them on, and once she decided what she liked—she meaning, crucially, Amanda—they would go from there.
On New Year’s Day, Amanda woke up early. Other than the watery warble of the pigeons outside the church, the Roman streets were silent. She arrived at the station and found it empty, too. She was finally putting a dent in the backlog of work, and it felt good. The awareness of her situation remained, but when she was reviewing the rote paperwork, the pain of it diminished. It became more like the throb of a toothache, omnipresent but dull. She’d never much enjoyed this part of the job, but now she felt a strange gratitude for it, this paper-sorting, this soothing work of entropy reversal. Maybe Kath is onto something, she thought.
And then—the timing was uncanny—a voice called out: “Anyone home?”
Kath appeared in her doorway. “Let me tell you something,” she said, plunking herself down with a sigh. “Key West is hell on earth. They should put Jimmy Buffett in jail.”
“You were in Florida?” Amanda raised her eyebrows. “I can’t picture it.”
“Turns out, neither can I.”
“I thought you weren’t getting back till the fifth.”
“Maybe I missed this miserable place. I like the sweater, by the way.” Kath cocked her head. “That’s a good color on you.”
At dinner that night, Kath observed that Amanda seemed a bit better. Amanda agreed with this. “I don’t want to say it’s been easy,” she said. “It hasn’t. Not at all. But it’s kind of… simple, you know? It’s just, like, get through the day. Wake up and do it again. And it sucks, but what else are you going to do?”
Kath nodded. Amanda was talking about the Charlie thing, but also the drinking thing, and Kath seemed to understand this. “It’s funny,” she continued. “It felt so dramatic when Komarovsky told us about the rumor. But a little time goes by, and it becomes just another piece of the puzzle. And it’s a big puzzle. And there are a lot of pieces.”
“And you have to take them one at a time.”
“Exactly.” After a pause, Amanda said: “Actually, I’ve been wanting to thank you.”
“For what?”
“Well, you’ve been so cool about everything. I know I’ve been kind of… messy. And you always give good advice.”
“Oh, stop. I’m bossy, that’s all.” Kath shook her head, but Amanda saw a trace of color rise in her cheeks. And then Kath changed the subject. Funny, Amanda thought. Kath, so comfortable in her own skin, so genuinely herself, seemed the type who would accept compliments with graceful ease. But wasn’t this the most essential lesson of her work? The alpha and omega of human intelligence: everyone wound up surprising you.
One piece at a time. This approach carried them back to London, through January and February, through their meetings with Komarovsky. Amanda was careful to invoke the Charlie Cole rumor every so often, reassuring the oligarch that they were keeping the operation airtight, extremely need-to-know, in case the rumor had any merit: concerned, but not too concerned.
Luckily, Komarovsky was too absorbed with his own problems to scrutinize her performance. David Hopkins, the CEO of Aeromach, was proving stubborn. In the months after their initial conversation, Hopkins had gotten it into his head that maybe he had leverage in this situation, too. So Komarovsky wanted him to cancel that $6 billion contract for those Polish missiles. Okay, fine. But this was already an uphill battle for Hopkins—don’t forget he had to contend with his board of directors—and if Aeromach announced this change, and the market freaked out, and the stock price went down, it would be his head on a spike, and certainly it would be better for Komarovsky if Hopkins was still around, right? So here’s what he wanted. On the day they announced the change, Komarovsky had to make sure the market liked the change. Understood?
As Komarovsky grumbled about the thickheaded entitlement of Americans, Amanda’s mind was whirring. “No,” she said. “Wait. Hang on a second. This is good. We can use this.”
And so, on a fast-approaching day in early March, Ivan Komarovsky would walk into the gallery in Soho. He and Vitsin would, as usual, retreat to the office in the back. While Komarovsky described Hopkins’s demand to Vitsin, and asked what the Kremlin wanted him to do, Amanda and her team would be listening in a nearby van.
When she told Komarovsky he was going to have to wear a wire, he balked. “What if Vitsin searches me?”
“He’s never searched you before.”
“But what if—”
“He’s not going to search you. But if he does, you give us the signal and we get you out of there. We’ll be through that door in thirty seconds flat.”
They needed hard proof to link the Kremlin to these manipulations. Without the recording, they only had Komarovsky’s word. And of course Amanda trusted him, of course Kath trusted him, but if they were going to bring this all the way to the White House, they needed more than trust.
This, she knew, would be their only shot. Komarovsky’s performance might work once. It wouldn’t work twice. He and Vitsin didn’t usually talk about these things. Vitsin didn’t know the first thing about taming the egos of brash American CEOs. Such a stark deviation from the usual pattern would catch his handler’s attention. The operation had more contingencies than Amanda would have liked, but there was no such thing as a perfect plan. Sooner or later, they had to take the plunge.
The team performed multiple dry runs. The first time, the signal from the transmitter concealed in Komarovsky’s cuff link failed to reach them. The nature of Berwick Street meant that a white panel van idling by the curb would be too conspicuous, so they’d parked around the corner on Livonia Street, but apparently even twenty yards was asking too much of the transmitter. In a mild panic, Amanda wondered if they were going to have to scrap it and start over. But then Bram, one of the guys from the agency’s Office of Technical Service, said: “The lamppost. The one outside the gallery. There’s a utility box at the bottom. We can install a repeater inside the box. It’ll give us another hundred yards, easy.”
On the second dry run, sitting in the van on Livonia Street, Amanda donned her headphones. There, crystal clear, she could hear Komarovsky flirting and laughing with the gallery assistant. Oh, yes, there was the boss. Right this way. Seats creaking. Door closing. “It’s Anya’s birthday next month,” Komarovsky said to Vitsin. “And you know how desperate she is for that Peter Doig. Can you work your magic, my friend?”
Amanda gave a thumbs-up to Bram. The repeater worked perfectly.
On the day before the operation, they ran through it one last time.
“And while you’re talking, if you suspect that he’s onto you?” Amanda asked.
Komarovsky recited: “I say, ‘David is on his yacht in Miami.’ ”
“And if you’re in imminent danger?”
“I say, ‘Please, Sasha, don’t you remember that night at Novikov?’ ”
If that happened, the team was prepared to enter the gallery, retrieve Komarovsky, and hustle him to the American embassy. The British authorities wouldn’t be thrilled about the storming of Vitsin Gallery, but it was also possible they would never hear about it. Deep cover officers, like Vitsin, didn’t enjoy drawing any attention to themselves.
“And if there’s no problem, and everything goes smoothly?”
“Osipov will drive me here.”
Amanda nodded. “Good. But if you have even the slightest sense that something is wrong, don’t come here. You’ll only lead the FSB directly to us. Got it? Just get in the car and have Osipov take you home.”
“He’s on the move,” said a staticky voice on the radio. “Getting in the car now.”
Amanda took a deep breath. “Copy that,” she said.
It was the next afternoon. She and Kath were in the back of the van on Livonia Street, with Bram in the driver’s seat. The second operative from OTS, the one who had just radioed in, was following the black Rolls-Royce as it departed Pavel Partners. The third operative from OTS was sitting outside a café on Berwick Street, with a direct sightline of the gallery. Bram turned around. The breast pocket of his blue work suit was embroidered with the logo of a fake plumbing company, which also decorated the outside of the panel van. “You good?” he said.
“Good,” Amanda answered for both of them, because Kath was engrossed in a pile of documents. “You?”
Bram nodded. “Gonna get a little shut-eye. Wake me up when he’s close.” He settled into his seat, pulled his baseball cap over his eyes, and, within seconds, started to snore.
Time was moving in strange ways. The last weeks had flown by—there had been so much to do, preparing for this moment—but now they were here, and the afternoon was passing in a slow drip. She checked her watch, but somehow it had only been four minutes since Komarovsky left the office.
The radio crackled with periodic updates on his progress through the London traffic. Amanda kept checking her watch. Kath kept turning pages, muttering to herself. On the day of a big operation, some people wore lucky socks, or drank their coffee out of a special mug. Kath liked to surround herself with the evidence, to literally surround herself with it, to arrange the papers in a kind of magic circle, like an on-the-fly version of the conference room back in Rome station. She claimed that it helped steel her nerves. (“Like reciting the catechism,” Amanda suggested. Kath gave her an odd look. Amanda shrugged and said: “Sunday school.”)
Shrieks and laughter from the sidewalk outside the van. School had just let out for the day. Eventually, the staticky voice on the radio said: “Turning onto Mortimer Street.” Amanda leaned forward and shook Bram’s shoulder.
And then it was happening. The Rolls pulled up along the curb on Berwick Street. Komarovsky emerged, wearing a navy blue suit and sunglasses. He ducked his head into the open door of the car and said: “I’ll call you when I’m done.”
“Sure thing, boss,” Osipov replied. The voices came through loud and clear, now that the transmitter in his cuff link was within distance of the signal repeater.
Bram caught Amanda’s eye in the rearview mirror. She nodded. “All right,” she whispered to herself. “Here we go.”
The second operative, the one at the café, said: “Target approaching gallery now.” The third operative said: “Taking up position in the alley.” As part of their prep work, OTS obtained blueprints for the building on Berwick Street and had discovered a back door. They would have eyes on both entrances.
For a brief moment, standing outside the gallery, Komarovsky paused. Across the street, the operative at the café removed his baseball cap and set it on the table. Komarovsky removed his sunglasses and placed them in his breast pocket. Confirmation that the audio was working. Confirmation received. He turned around, opened the door, and disappeared from sight.
“Ivan!” a bright voice said. The audio remained crystal clear. The cheerful click of high heels across the floor. “How nice to see you. I didn’t realize we were expecting you.”
“Oh, you weren’t. I just happened to be in the neighborhood. Is Alexander around?”
“He is, but let me just…” Heels clacking back across the floor, her voice growing fainter. “I’m terribly sorry, Ivan, it looks like he’s still on the phone. Do you mind very much waiting a few minutes?”
“Of course not.”
“It shouldn’t be long. Can I get you any tea?”
“Tea would be lovely.”
Deep breathing, creaking floorboards. Amanda didn’t need eyes on Komarovsky to know what he must look like: shifting his weight, glancing at the doors, hands in his pockets to hide the fidgeting. A minute later, as the heels clacked back across the floor, he said: “Wonderful. Thank you.”
“It’s funny, you know. Alexander was just talking about you this morning.”
“Really?” He cleared his throat. “Why… why is that?”
“Oh, no. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”
“My dear, you must tell me. This weary old heart isn’t up for surprises these days. You don’t want me to keel over and die of a heart attack, do you?”
She laughed. “Well, then, do you promise to act surprised?”
“I promise.”
“Well.” She lowered her voice. “It’s the Peter Doig.”
“The…?”
“The painting Anya wanted for her birthday? It’s the—”
“Of course!” Booming laughter. “The Peter Doig! Ah, yes, of course. Actually, you know what, I’ve changed my mind. Don’t say anything more. He can tell me himself.”
A third voice chimed in. “Vanya,” Vitsin said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Sasha. I’m sorry to ambush you. But I could use your advice, and I happened to be in the neighborhood, and this is rather… time-sensitive.”
“I see.” A pause. “In that case, right this way.”
Footsteps as the men retreated toward the back. “It’s David Hopkins,” Komarovsky whispered. “The CEO of Aeromach. He called me this morning. He isn’t—”
“Wait,” Vitsin said harshly. “Not until we’re in the office.”
The footsteps halted. The sound of a door opening, then closing. Bodies lowering into chairs. “Hopkins is being stubborn,” Komarovsky said. “He told me—”
And then a high-pitched noise shrieked in Amanda’s ears.
“What the FUCK!” she yelped, ripping off her headphones. She whipped around: Kath had done the same, and so had Bram. The piercing wail was bleeding from all of their headphones.
Bram scrambled into the back of the van. “Did you touch anything?” he barked.
“Of course I didn’t touch anything. What the hell is going on?”
“Everything looks okay,” he said, surveying the audio equipment. He spoke into the radio. “Is it the repeater? Did something knock it out?”
“Checking now,” a voice crackled. After a few beats: “Negative. Repeater is up and running.”
“Is anyone getting anything?” Amanda said, desperately aware of the seconds slipping past, seconds in which Vitsin might be giving them exactly what they needed. “Anything at all?”
“Transmitter malfunction?” Bram asked, frowning.
“Extremely unlikely,” one of the voices said.
“But not impossible?”
“Sure. Totally. So then it’s just a coincidence that it malfunctions the second he steps into Vitsin’s office. Sure. I buy it.”
Bram sighed. “These fucking Russians, man.”
“Bram,” Amanda said. “Bram. What the hell is going on?”
“He’s jamming the frequency.”
“But that means—”
“It means Vitsin probably knew this was coming. Someone warned him.”
(He’s working for Moscow, Komarovsky had said.)
“Jesus Christ,” Amanda said. “Oh, fuck. Fuck. We have to get him out of there.”
She was halfway out of her seat when Kath reached over and grabbed her arm. “Sit down,” she snapped. “We’re not doing anything.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Take a breath. We don’t know what Vitsin knows.”
“We know he knows something! Otherwise—”
“Not necessarily,” Kath interrupted. “This is a standard precaution for an FSB officer. Vitsin has done it before. Don’t you remember that time at the Dorchester?”
Blood thumped in her ears. “You’ll have to remind me,” Amanda said testily.
“Vitsin was having a drink with someone,” Kath said. “I was three seats away, down the bar. I could hear everything they were saying—they weren’t being discreet, the conversation was pretty innocuous—but I wanted to test my theory, so I turned on my recorder. When I got home and checked the audio, it was completely fuzzed up. You couldn’t hear a thing. Only white noise. If Vitsin takes that precaution for a conversation that isn’t incriminating, of course he’ll do the same for one that is.”
“But this never happened during our test runs.”
“Because Komarovsky never said anything meaningful during our test runs. And Vitsin trusts him, at this point, so he doesn’t bother jamming every conversation they have. But when his agent starts yammering about David Hopkins?” Kath gestured toward Berwick Street. “Vitsin flips the switch. He’d be an idiot not to. And we know he’s not an idiot.”
Amanda stared at Kath. “Are you certain about this?”
“Of course not. I’m not certain about anything.”
“Bram?” she said. “What do you think?”
He shook his head. “You’re in charge, Cole.”
“Well, what are our options? Other than sitting here and doing nothing?”
“We still have our extraction plan.”
“Right.” Kath rolled her eyes. “Great idea. Storm the gallery and blow his cover sky-high. If we go in there, Amanda, that’s it. We lose any hope of a second chance.”
“You seriously think we’re going to get a second chance?”
“I’d rather keep the option open than not.”
Amanda closed her eyes. Bram and the other operatives were former Navy SEALs. If she asked them to extract Komarovsky, they would succeed. Without question, they would succeed. And his cover would be blown, but he would be safe. Anya and his children would see him again.
But where would that leave her? And where would it leave Bob Vogel? And Diane Vogel? And Konstantin Semonov?
See, people usually got this wrong. The hardest part of the job wasn’t the action. It was the moments of passivity; the moments when there was nothing to do but sit there, letting things unfold, white-knuckling your way through it. Amanda took a deep breath. “Fine,” she said. “We wait. But as soon as he walks through that door, we find a way to intercept him. Got it? I need to know what the fuck we’re dealing with.”