She’d mixed a special bourbon-tranquilizer concoction for Rance that should keep him out solid for another two hours. She listened to him breathe heavily for a moment before picking up her small clutch purse, already positioned by the sink. With one eye on Rance’s bare white ass, his freckled back rising and falling on the bed, she retrieved a small device disguised as lipstick.
She extended a thin cord from its cylindrical bottom and plugged it into the phone’s power port, which lit up. After about ten seconds, she checked the screen, which was dark, indicating that it had done its work. She retracted the cord into the lipstick container, wiped the phone free of fingerprints, and reinserted it into his pocket. She carefully replaced the coat and slipped back into bed next to him.
God, she thought, listening to him snore, staring at a finely plastered ceiling medallion. Why do we always have to do this in my hotel room? If it had been his room, she could have just gotten up and left. The disciplined Russian SVR Directorate S officer lay like a marble statue until a quarter to nine, then shook Rance hard and reminded him he needed to get home. Best not to jeopardize this collection op by tipping off the wife.
Around ten, after Rance had finally left, complaining of a pounding headache, she took a hot shower to scrub herself clean. That unpleasant task over, she donned a tight black running outfit and tucked her hair in a watch cap. To disguise her face and shield herself from the cold, she wore a balaclava over her mouth and neck. She strapped on a small Camelback backpack with a water bladder, as well as a cargo pocket filled with her tools of the trade. She made her way to the lobby, past the night bellman, and out the front door.
A blast of cold mist greeted her on H Street. She picked up the pace, hoping to warm up, while turning variously to random streets, some lit, others dark. Every now and then she stopped to watch for movement through the reflection of shopwindows, disguising it by retying her Nikes.
Her target, Rance, was a sloppy senior case officer. One of these days the intelligence he provided would be traced back to him and the FBI would start tailing him and all of his private contacts. But she saw no sign of that comeuppance this evening. Just a city asleep on a typical Thursday night.
After a jog down Independence and out three-quarters of a mile toward Union Station, she sprinted across Constitution, past the Capitol rotunda, and onto the Mall. Somewhere in the middle, near an enormous oak, she stopped.
She pulled down her balaclava and noted the thick cloud of steam coming from her lungs. On this freezing night she saw no one, save for a sleeping derelict on a park bench well over a hundred yards away. She removed her backpack and sat under the tree, her back against the trunk, stretching her hamstrings, crunching against the frozen grass.
Genevieve, whose actual name was Maria Borbova, plugged the fake lipstick device into a port on her Android tablet. She donned a set of earbuds and went through a preprogrammed series of gestures, apps, and codes to turn the generic tablet into an SVR field computer. After all of this digital voodoo, she uploaded the filched audio file from Rance’s phone.
The spyware program was only moderately effective. Through trial and error, SVR had learned that in order to avoid detection by CIA forensics, the file had to be very, very small. It also couldn’t upload its payload over a wireless connection. Anything that violated these two parameters would tip off info-tech specialists, who were constantly on the lookout for it. Rather, the embedded Android APK recorded conversations only when the phone was on, tapping into the passive microphone.
So far, regrettably, the snoop had been moderately effective at best. Since case officers went into secure rooms for conversations without their phones, most of what she heard was inconsequential bureaucratese. That was the trouble with this kind of op. It was all so damned random. If it were up to her, she would scuttle this surveillance tool. But it wasn’t up to her. Far from it.
Rance’s job, though officially the head of the Counterproliferation Division, was mostly one of administration. Still, SVR had assigned her to him because, when it came to peddling weapons to embargoed countries around the world, many of the foreign agents they faced reported up through his case officers. The thinking was that they could piece together enough fragments of information to be able to assemble a credible hierarchy of the spy network. That was the way Yasenevo saw it anyway.
Regardless of the reasoning, Maria had had to sleep with the man four times over the last three months and had little to show for it, other than a degraded sense of self. Her professional training allowed her to endure it all without too much psychological harm; but she was only human. If the take remained slight, she hoped fervently that SVR would move her onto something else—someone else anyway.
Listening now to Rance’s one-sided conversations, she took notes on her tablet to an encrypted app. The tiny size limit of the captured audio file allowed only about twenty-four hours of recording, which were encoded at an ultraefficient bit rate. The sound quality was terrible.
Just like her previous two hauls, this one started with Rance leaving home, saying a few words to the wife. Just like the last two, he started his day by complaining to her about the lethargy of their fifteen-year-old son. Rance’s kid seemed to have a marijuana problem. Maria sighed. She’d slept with him for this?
But then, as Rance got to the office, the recording changed. He was busily barking to his secretary about the arrival of someone. He wanted his schedule cleared to be able to meet with this arrival and also, significantly, the deputy director of Clandestine Services, Jeff Dorsey. Maria paused the recording and jotted several notes. Finally, she thought. Something worth reporting.
The meeting was with a person named Meredith Morris-Dale. She was to come in and see Rance as soon as she landed. He wanted the secretary to send drivers to pick her up. She was landing at Langley Air Force Base about two hours away, down near Norfolk.
After that, there was more bureaucratic grumbling, on and on about budgets, head count, real estate. By now the sweat in Maria’s clothes was freezing her. She needed to move this along. She fast-forwarded through snippets of Rance’s day that were uninteresting.
Finally, she landed on the conversation with Meredith Morris-Dale. She knew it because Rance used her name liberally. Maria was able only to catch fragments of Morris-Dale’s voice through the passive mic, but his was loud and clear.
There was a brief reference to SVR. This caught Maria’s attention. She heard enough of Meredith’s voice to catch “Dubai.” An operation called Sagebrush. Maria transcribed furiously, her fingers flying over the small keyboard.
There followed references to the Dorsey meeting. After that a lot of chitchat with Dorsey himself. Morris-Dale doing most of the talking, but inaudibly. Then nothing until the end of the day. Maria stopped typing and went back over certain sections of the recording to make sure she had it right.
The last voice conversation, before Rance arrived at the Hay-Adams to see her, was him leaving a voice mail. From the background noise she could tell he’d been driving. Meredith Morris-Dale was to get out to Seattle to see her husband. The fact that Rance ordered her to do so with haste and instructed her not to just call him seemed significant. He ended it with “Oh—and why don’t you say hello to John for me?” Knowing Rance as she did, she thought he was being sarcastic. Strange.
She typed a note to herself:
John and Meredith Morris-Dale: married officers (?) central to some kind of follow-up from a suspected SVR rendition of asset Sagebrush, Dubai (?). Operational security advised; no phone conversations allowed. Directed personally (?) by Dorsey.
She reread her own note. Maybe worth something. Maybe not. She’d let Yasenevo figure it out.
She blew warm air through her cupped hands and thought of another angle. A Google dive of Meredith’s name on the tablet’s browser revealed nothing. The absence of any search result was in itself interesting, she thought. She knew the Agency had strict rules about online presence. However, those rules didn’t apply to family; or if they did, the Agency seemed to have a hard time enforcing them. She did a search on just the name Morris-Dale, Washington, DC.
Bingo: a girl named Grace Morris-Dale had been a student at Georgetown Prep, a soccer player in her senior year.
Daughter? Sister? Cousin? She opened Facebook. Grace Morris-Dale had a public profile. There was a graduation picture from somewhere. The girl looked to be about seventeen in the picture. She was standing between her parents, wearing her mortarboard. “With Meredith and John,” read the caption.
Maria zoomed in on the image of the parents. Good-looking family. She’d come to think of Americans as congenitally fat and lazy. But these three were fit and healthy, standing on an outdoor stage somewhere. Meredith’s face was behind sunglasses, a lean face, pretty in a severe way. The father had brown hair bronzed by the sun, brown eyes, olive skin, and a beard with gray streaks. He looked like he could have been Middle Eastern himself, or Greek or Italian. Hard to say. Though he wasn’t obscured by sunglasses, he seemed to be shrinking before the camera, eyes down, chin sideways, only a faint closemouthed grin.
Maria snapped a screenshot and saved the image to her tablet. She then Googled the name John Morris-Dale, Seattle. Nothing. Figuring he might go by just John Dale, she tried that. A number of people came up; none of them seemed to be the man in the picture. But it was a poor image of him to begin with. She was shivering.
She opened a second encrypted app. It took her five more minutes to file the contact report to her superiors at SVR HQ in Yasenevo. She described Meredith Morris-Dale as a possible lead case officer in an undetermined operation in the Middle East, likely Dubai, resulting in a CIA-suspected SVR rendition. She added a sentence about a meet with her husband, John, also a possible case officer but undetermined. She annotated the report with the photo from Grace’s Facebook.
By the time she was done typing on the glowing glass screen, her hands were shaking with cold, her teeth chattering. She encrypted the file and hit the send button, launching it off to an SVR server, somewhere out there in the ether.
Sitting there in the dark before a now-empty screen, she thought about the report she’d just sent. It seemed obvious to her that this was important. If it was obvious to her, then it would be obvious to her superiors. She knew what they would ask her to do.
She reopened her browser and Googled flights to Seattle. It took five more minutes to buy a first-class ticket on a six o’clock out of Reagan National, using the Genevieve Lund alias.
There wasn’t even a need to enter a passport. All of this while standing here in the middle of the National Mall in the middle of the night.
You have to love America, she thought.