Marnie merged onto Interstate 495 several minutes later, coming to a complete stop just a few seconds later. Eight thirty p.m. might be a more realistic estimate. Traffic was heavier than she’d anticipated. If it didn’t break up after the George Washington Memorial Parkway interchange, about five miles north of here, she’d call the town house owner and let her know that she was behind schedule. Hopefully that wouldn’t be a problem and push things back until the morning. The last thing she wanted to do was add more stress to Devin’s situation right now. He sounded as though he was at a breaking point.

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 24

Harvey Rudd scraped the last of the marinara sauce out of the tiny bowl before shoving the final mozzarella stick into his mouth. They never gave you enough sauce for the whole basket. He licked his fingers clean, a Chattanooga barbecue-joint habit that Jolene loathed. She shook her head and looked away as he went from finger to finger. Long gone were the days when she would complain.

They’d gotten along like that for as long as he could remember. From the beginning, actually, which was why they’d eventually been put together as a team. He remembered the first time he’d laid eyes on her like it was yesterday. They had been flirting for a few months between classes during their first semester at Moscow State University, not quite dating, when Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) agents abruptly plucked them out of school and sent them to an intensive American studies institute on the outskirts of Novosibirsk. GRU authorities told them the academy was a temporary extension of their studies at the School of International Relations, but both of them knew better.

The institute, which reminded him of a Komsomol academy he had attended a few summers ago for a young communist leadership camp, was run more like a military program than an academic extension. They lived in well-worn but solid barracks buildings, and participated in rigorous physical training twice a day, once in the early morning and again after classes ended in the late afternoon. The instructors had been conditioning them for something big. That much was obvious.

Despite the harsh, scarcely academic conditions, he had never considered leaving. On most weekends, the hundred or so students were bused in groups to downtown Novosibirsk for a few hours of leisure time, where they spent most of their university stipend on restaurant meals they could never afford back in Moscow. He’d spent most of that time with Ludmilla, a.k.a. Jolene, building the relationship that would lead to their marriage and get them posted together in the United States. She had gotten him through the darkest of days with little more than a smile, and the prospect of her companionship on the weekend.