Chapter One

I’m losing them, he thinks. Always that way when we get to the Hanseatic League. Can almost see the scales descending as their eyes gloss over, the thousand-yard stare, a yawn here and there. Wannabe historians and they get bored with the Hanseatic League. Same every semester.

And as with every semester, he pulls a modern analogy out of his hat.

“Think of it as a precursor to the European Union,” Jake says. “Or NATO, even.”

But maybe it’s not the Hanseatic League that’s putting them to sleep, Jake begins to think, noticing that the clutch of students is chattering now, passing around a gigantic iPhone. Redfern in the front gets the phone next and his eyes go wide.

“Mr. Redfern, may I ask what the hell is going on?” His professor tone. “This is class, not a time for social media.”

Appositely named Redfern, red-headed and freckle-faced, has the good grace to blush.

“Sorry, Professor Jacobs. Maybe you should see this.”

“The only thing I would like to see from this seminar is concentration on the subject at hand.”

Abrasive young Michaels, seated behind Redfern, is, as usual, less diplomatic.

“Says on this site you were a spook, Professor Jacobs. That true?”

Jake feels a clutch in his chest. He swallows hard, trying to cover his confusion.

“Do not believe everything you read online, Mr. Michaels. A good historian is also a careful analyzer of sources.”

He tries for nonchalance; not sure it comes off that way.

“Really looks like your picture here,” Michaels says. “Younger for sure, but if not, you’ve got a doppelganger.”

“Let’s return to the Hanseatic League, ladies and gentlemen.”

He struggles through the rest of the seminar and piles on extra reading on Baltic maritime trade in the Middle Ages as a sort of punishment. He’s managed to rein in his curiosity to see what site would be running a picture of him.

But really, what the hell does it matter? he asks himself as he heads out of Social Sciences to his aged Mercedes. Who cares if I was an agent or not? Ancient history. He never brings it up; his job is education now. All that world of CIA is in back of him. Out of the agency for more than twenty years.

Reaching the faculty parking, he unlocks the car door, tosses his backpack filled with papers to grade onto the passenger side, slides onto the cold leather of the seat, inserts the key, and teases the car to life.

Rain starts halfway home, and he turns on the wipers. The left one allows a wide streak of moisture as it sweeps back and forth. He’s been meaning to change it for months.

By the time he gets to his condo, the rain—driven by a blustery wind—is coming down sideways.

And me with no raincoat. Sunny when he left this afternoon.

Getting out of the car and running for his door, he wonders for the hundredth time, Why the hell did I ever come to this evergreen, ever-wet freaking state?

And for the hundredth time he reminds himself: Because of my daughter. Because of Anne.

All grown up now and on her own, working in Silicon Valley. And me still here in Portland like a beached whale.

Shut it, Jacobs, he tells himself, unlocking the front door and bursting into the tiled entry, dripping water.

First thing he sees is the red light blinking on his phone. He doesn’t bother anymore with a cell. Jake Jacobs, landliner. Not a Luddite, just wants to control his own time.

He ignores the blinking light, sets down his briefcase, shakes out his tweed jacket, and heads for the drinks cupboard. An inch of Islay to allay the wet.

One inch leads to a second as he settles in the wingback and turns on the local classical station. Bach. He’s in the mood for Mozart, Mahler even. But he’s too lazy to look for a CD. Anne keeps telling him he needs to subscribe to Spotify.

He finishes his drink, does his nightly fifty pull-ups on the steel bar he bolted across the top of the door jamb to the closet, puffs his way through fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups and is on the way to bed. He again notices the red light on the phone. Totally forgot about it. Could be Anne, he thinks, and presses the playback.

“Well fuck all, old boy. I thought I might get a bit of chin wag with you personally, but…”

Jake hits the playback button again, stopping it. Christ. He’d recognize that tony voice anywhere. Armitage. Bastard Lawrence Armitage from Directorate of Operations. What the hell does he want after all these years?

And then he remembers the seminar tonight. “You were a spook?”

He lets the message run again.

“… I guess I’ll just have to satisfy myself with a recording. And what the hell, Jacobs? You too cheap to buy a cell? Or just stuck in the past? The grand historian. But I haven’t called to berate you. Much too easy, that. Perhaps you are not so stuck in the past that you don’t own one of those tube thingies that connect you to the great wide world. If so, I highly suggest a visit to a site called Reckoning. Warm up the old tubes and take a gander. Looks like chickens may be coming home to roost. By the by, you’ll want to know that Peter Driscoll met with a tragic accident earlier today. Seems he drowned in his pool in Florida. Peter was a hell of a swimmer. Took early retirement to devote himself to triathlon. A little back-watching might be in order, but I leave that to you, old boy.”

Armitage and his stupid, mincing locutions. Old boy. Screw you.

But the name Peter Driscoll does send a worm of unease in his guts. And this makes him want to check out Reckoning.

In fact, Jake does own a computer, a flashy little Apple laptop that Anne gifted him last birthday. He told her he wasn’t celebrating them anymore—you get over fifty and it’s just not fucking funny anymore. But, the laptop.

He keeps it in the spare bedroom he’s converted into an office, on the desk amid a sprawl of files, hand-written notes, and books he’s researching for a work on what he calls ‘The Fourth Mole.’ Espionage activities not attributable to the three big moles of the 1980s: Edward Lee Howard and Aldrich Ames of the CIA, and Robert Hanssen of the FBI. The project started as a funky sort of hobby, but now consumes him so that he has trained himself not only in the grinding work of research, but also in the layered depths of the cyber world. Still refuses to let on to his tech-savvy daughter that he is quite comfortable in her world—with limitations.

The more he delves into the hits the CIA took in the 1980s, the more it seems obvious to him that there had to be a fourth mole in the very guts of the U.S. intelligence community. Someone else beyond that infamous trio of Howard, Ames, and Hanssen passing on inside information to the KGB and GRU. Even to the KGB successors, the FSB and SVR. Someone at the very heart of U.S. intelligence, and someone perhaps still active.

But now he fires up the laptop and keys in Reckoning and up pops a very cluttered website with a row of five photos made to look like most-wanted mugshots at the post office. His is third from the left, after Lawrence Armitage and his old colleague from Vienna days, Will “Sandy” Sanderson. The fourth picture is of Yuri Vosenko, former station chief for the Sovs in Vienna.

Jake takes a deep breath. He doesn’t like where this is going.

The fifth picture is of Peter Driscoll. Recently deceased.

Under each of the photos is the CIA title and in Vosenko’s case, his title as KGB Rezident.

The tag line to the photos reads: “Remember Vienna 1988? Justice is coming. A Reckoning is at hand. I spy you. You are all on my personal Bigot list.”

As Jake finishes reading it, a thick, black X suddenly appears over Driscoll’s face.

He slams the laptop shut, his heart racing, his fingers drumming hollowly on the desk.

Remember Vienna 1988? Fuck all, he’d spent the better part of three decades trying to forget it. A piss poor revenge op at the tail end of the Cold War.

Yeah, Jake thinks. I remember Vienna 1988…

There were three of them in the parked Mercedes, waiting for the meet. Waiting in the dark night. Reni was in the back seat and held out a filter-tipped Dames to be lit. Jake, sitting in the front passenger seat, searched in the dark for the dash lighter, finally found and pulled it out, then held it over the back of his seat. She nudged the cigarette into the glowing socket and sucked deeply. An orange glow lit the car interior momentarily.

“Keep it low,” Sanderson, the driver, said. His usually gruff voice was nasal and muffled from a cold. Sandy did not take his eyes off the windshield as he spoke, as if he were still driving instead of parked at curbside.

Jake shrugged at Reni to show how comical he thought Sanderson’s precautions were; to put her at ease. It didn’t work. She took one puff, then crushed the cigarette in the ashtray on the car door, raking fingers through her loose blond hair.

“You sure you want us to go through with this, Jake?”

I’m not sure of anything anymore, he thought, replacing the lighter. Not my wife, not my job, for sure not this snatch.

“Go through with what?” He looked her square in her blue eyes, turning half way round in his front seat to do so.

“Jake.” Her voice went down at the end, reprovingly, but she smiled at him. He wished she wouldn’t.

“You take me for the silly little farm girl from Styria still? How long have I worked for you? I know when you plan something big. You always wear your Loden coat.”

“It’s cold.” And the stupid sods in Washington have no idea of the field. They just order a snatch; a snatch it is. Make up for Iran-Contra; the Marine guard in Moscow compromised by Soviet swallows; the Walker spy ring; Howard hot-footing it to Moscow, one step ahead of the F.B.I.; Pollard spying for the Israelis. Fucking defectors all over the map and a goodly number of the Agency’s Soviet moles rolled up, victims of the 9mm solution.

So, the CIA needs a win.

“We’ve been taking hits, my friend,” Armitage from the Directorate of Operations had told him on his fact-finding tour last week. “The President doesn’t like it. Casey doesn’t like it. They want to hit back for a change.”

And so, this snatch. So, this stupid, got-you-last game.

He bundled deeper into the folds of the Loden coat.

“Such a silly coat, Jake. You look like a bookkeeper in it.”

“You’re going soft on this one, Reni.” He turned his attention to the side window now, absently gazing at the back-lit silhouette of the Votivkirche. It shimmered in the darkness, a beautiful, eerie Gothic structure. He’d been bitterly disappointed to learn it was a fake: built late nineteenth century in thanks for a failed assassination attempt on Emperor Franz Joseph. Reni had told him that.

Reni, the debunker of myths.

“He is sweet, Jake. A big Russian bear. I think he loves me. He says he does. But he knows nothing you cannot read in Pravda. A functionary, Jake. Just like you.”

“I don’t know what the hell you think is going on, Reni. It’s a meet, just like always. A simple meet.”

“With back-up?”

Shit, he thought. So, she’s noticed. He’d wanted to keep her in the dark; keep it natural. He said nothing.

The silence was broken by the jangling of a tram bell on the street nearby. Number 38 from Grinzing.

It’ll be the last one of the night, he thought. Midnight soon. No pedestrians, no witnesses. All the good Viennese tucked under eiderdown for the night. He kept staring at the silhouette of the church.

“It’s stupid, Jake. Let me tell you that. Cowboys and Indians. There’s no need. The Cold War is over.”

“Tell that to Moscow.” But he knew she was right. The Soviets were broke. We’d outspent them. Going bankrupt ourselves in the process. Better I’m at home repairing the damage with the wife and baby Anne. But they want results in Washington. Armitage with his English suits and transatlantic accent made that painfully clear. Results. Something to get the media off our backs. Got you last. And so, he was using Reni just like they told him to. The dutiful deputy station chief.

Reni sighed heavily. Jake could hear the zipper close on her down ski jacket.

“So, I guess it’s time to go. I shouldn’t make him wait in the cold.”

He kept his back to her as she opened the door and got out. A blast of night air made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

“He is sweet, Jake,” she said before closing the door. “And this is not necessary.”

“Everything’s going to be all right,” he said, looking at a chipped thumb nail now. “You just get to the church before he does a scamper.”

She closed the door lightly and he watched as she crossed Roosevelt Park toward the church, so small and fragile-looking in jacket and jeans.

“Who’ve we got in the bushes?”

Sanderson wiped a drop from the end of his nose. “New boy, Driscoll. Peter Driscoll. Seems okay. But there’s not going to be any trouble. No way Vosenko’s bringing along back-up to meet his lover.”

There was an edge to Sanderson’s voice; a tiny reprimand.

“What is it, Sandy?”

Sanderson’s pudgy hands gripped the wheel. “Nothing.”

“Bullshit. Something’s stuck in your gizzard.”

“We having sensitivity training now, Jake?”

“Fuck you.”

“Okay. It’s this snatch. Reni’s right. Not necessary.”

“Vosenko’s their head of goddamn station.” Say it often enough and you’ll convince yourself.

“So, great. He can tell us where the toilets are in the Lubyanka. Big deal.” Sanderson fished out a crumpled handkerchief from his coat pocket and blew his nose. “We start lifting the opposition and we’ll have turf wars like you’ve never seen.”

“He’s their expert on the Warsaw Pact.”

“Oh, sorry. Where the toilets are in Poland. We want information on troop movements, we look at the satellite photos. Humint’s a thing of the past, for Christ sake. You know it and I know it. This is a frigging dinosaur action. And the meteors are falling, Jake. Bad time for dinosaurs.”

Which was essentially what Jake himself had told Armitage last week, with no results.

“You trying to tell me my job?”

Sanderson gripped the steering wheel harder, the muscles in his jaw working.

“It’s a simple snatch,” Jake said again without conviction. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you two.”

“Okay.” Sanderson threw his hands off the wheel as if giving up. “I’ll see what the hell’s going on.”

He scooted out of the car and into the darkness. Jake’s stomach was acting up again, bile burn in the throat. Dug around in the glove compartment for his antacids. No luck. Always this way on an op. Sanderson once told him some guys are just not made for ops. Desk jockeys, he called them.

Truth was, at this moment in time, Jake would much rather have been riding his desk chair.

It took a moment for Jake to register the first cracking sound. Then it sank in. Gunfire. Coming from the church. He dug his gun out of the glove compartment and moved out of the car, avoiding the shrubbery-lined paths of the tiny park in front of the church. Instead, he raced around the perimeter of the park to his right. The back-up was to his left; Sanderson in the middle. He wanted no crossing fields of fire. The coat wrapped around his legs as he ran; his heels clacked on the sidewalk.

Fly, damnit. Move.

A simple snatch. What the hell’s gone wrong?

A second round of shots made him race even faster. His heart pounding in his chest, his mouth was dry, and the gun was dead weight in his hand. He rounded the corner of the park and saw two men standing at the bottom of the wide arc of steps to the church, their shoulders slumped. Jake dropped to one knee, holding the pistol in a triangle from his body. One of the men on the steps turned around. It was Sanderson. He shook his head at Jake.

As he approached, he saw her hand dangling over the bottom step. A bad movie; not real. She’s having me on. Teasing like she always does.

Got you last.

But when he reached the steps, he could see this was no game. Blood pooled beneath her head, or what was left of it. He thought he would be sick. Bile still burned in his throat.

Lights went on in apartments over the park. A shade was pulled up in a cupola window just next to the church. A dog barked in the distance. The looping two-tone siren of the Viennese police sounded in the night.

Sanderson tugged at his arm. “We got to get out of here, Jake.”

He wanted to grab her, to shake her awake. “We can’t leave her like this.”

“She’s dead, Jake. Get it? We don’t want to be found here.”

He was only vaguely aware of the other man, Driscoll, the backup from the bushes, never looking at him until he suddenly moved off, tall and lithe-moving, blending into the darkness.

His mind swirled. What the hell went wrong?

Reni looked so cold on the steps that Jake took off his Loden coat and floated it over her body. Her broken body. Reni the debunker of myths.

The sirens grew louder.

“Come on, Jake. Move.”

He let himself be pulled away, looking back once. So small under the coat. Like she was not there at all.