49

COROLLA, NORTH CAROLINA

“It was Stephens, wasn’t it?” Annie suddenly asked. “He leaked it, right?”

Marcus was doing laps in the small pool behind the house. The noonday sun was bright and warm. The sky was an azure blue. White puffy clouds could be seen out over the Atlantic. But thunderheads were rolling in from the north.

“Or am I missing something?” she asked as he swam over to her.

“No, that’s where I come out too,” Marcus replied. “But for the first time in my life, I don’t know what to do. I know you want me to retire and move on with my life. And believe me, that sounds more and more attractive with every passing hour. But I don’t believe in surrendering in the middle of a firefight. That’s not in my DNA. Yet I can’t see a way to fight back without making the situation worse.”

“You want to know what I think?” Annie asked, sitting down on the edge of the pool and dangling her feet in the water.

“You have a plan?”

“I do,” she said. “You need to launch a surgical counterstrike.”

“Meaning?”

“You helped the Raven escape from Russia with a treasure trove of Kremlin secrets, right?”

“Right.”

“But you also helped the Raven assassinate the Russian president and FSB chief.”

Marcus stared at her. “What happened in Russia is classified beyond top secret, Annie. Those files aren’t in any database you’re authorized to access. So how do you know—or think you know—anything about it?”

“Have you forgotten that when all this was happening, Nick Vinetti asked Senator Dayton and me to take your mom and sisters out for dinner? He asked us to tell them some cockamamie story about how you’d flown back to D.C. with us from Moscow but came down with some mysterious disease and had to be hospitalized at Walter Reed. Any of that ring a bell?”

“You didn’t buy Vinetti’s story.”

“Of course not. You left with us out of Moscow. But you got off the senator’s plane in Berlin. You didn’t say why, but later I could only assume you snuck back into Russia somehow to link up with the Raven and make sure all of his secrets came out with him.”

Marcus didn’t confirm the story, but he didn’t deny it either.

“I don’t know exactly what happened between you and the Raven,” Annie continued. “And honestly, I don’t want to know. Not because I blame you or think you were wrong. To the contrary. Whatever you did or didn’t do, somehow you and the Raven—whoever he or she is—stopped a Russian invasion of NATO that could have really gotten out of control. You deserve a medal, not this high-tech lynching.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow where you’re going with all this,” Marcus said.

“Of course you do,” she said. “You’re just too much of a gentleman to pull the trigger.”

“Meaning what?”

“Didn’t Stephens blame you for those assassinations in Moscow?”

“For the sake of argument, hypothetically, let’s say yes.”

“Didn’t he want to silence you?”

“Let’s say he did.”

“He certainly didn’t want the president to pardon you, right?”

Marcus didn’t answer, astonished by how much Annie knew of a story almost nobody in the U.S. government, or any government, knew.

“At one point, you called into Langley from wherever you were on the Karelian Isthmus in the middle of that snowstorm and spoke to Stephens, right?”

Marcus said nothing.

“That gave Stephens your precise location at that moment. And you obviously suspected Stephens might give that information to the Russians so they could take you and the Raven out with a couple of drones.”

“Seriously, where did you get all this?” Marcus asked, incredulous.

“Just answer the question. Did you suspect that Stephens might sell you out to the Russians?”

“More than suspect,” Marcus finally confided. “I was certain.”

“And you were right,” Annie said. “The director of the Central Intelligence Agency picked up a phone and spoke to the head of the Russian FSB. He told him he had you on the line. He gave him your precise coordinates. And he told him to, quote, ‘make the problem go away.’ Am I wrong?”

Someone had to have told her this information. But who? Jenny Morris? She’d been sitting in the car next to Marcus when he made the call to Stephens. But why would she have told Annie? Pete Hwang didn’t know any of this. Geoff Stone didn’t. Nor did Donny Callaghan or Noah Daniels. His family certainly didn’t know. McDermott knew, but again, why would he tell Annie?

“No, you’re not wrong,” Marcus said quietly.

“Yes, someone told me,” Annie replied, reading the look in his eyes.

“Who?”

“I can’t tell you that. But even if I could, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Stephens tried to have you killed, right?”

“Yes.”

“He tried to have an American citizen murdered, on foreign soil, with the FSB’s active assistance, without presidential authorization. Am I right?”

“I’m afraid you are.”

“Then that’s what we hang Stephens with.”

“I’d love nothing more, Annie, but we’d need more proof than your say-so and mine.”

“And I have it,” Annie said.