“Keep your chin up,” said Rudd. “They didn’t take popping him off the table.”

“Well. There’s that. See you in a few hours.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, too,” she said.

Rudd had meant what he’d said about not complaining. Something gave him the sense that this whole mission could escalate at the drop of a hat. Like the situation with Helen Gray. Dave Bender probably never knew what hit him. She’d lit him up before any of them could react.

Devin Gray didn’t strike him as the instantly lethal type, but as the old saying goes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—and he’d like to stay as far away from that family tree as possible this close to retirement.

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 15

Devin massaged his chin, his fingers pushing through the thick stubble. Morning had finally arrived, the first vestiges of light appearing through the gaps in the living room curtains visible from his seat at the desk. They’d been up all night studying “the wall,” both of them feeling like they had barely scratched the surface. Helen’s binders were extensive, representing hundreds of hours of reading and study. Working continuously from the moment they stepped up to the wall until now, they’d only pulled about a tenth of the folders from “the library,” mostly skimming each folder’s contents for the context necessary to track his mother’s logic chain.

Devin had followed her story from start to finish, admittedly skimming the files instead of scrutinizing them, and it all made perfect sense.

Based on the service background file she’d left behind, she had worked as a specialized skills officer, serving in an on-demand capacity as an NOC (nonofficial cover) throughout Europe, Russia, and Russia’s former satellite nations. She spoke fluent Russian and German, and had earned a master’s degree in international relations at Boston University. The CIA apparently hadn’t wanted to potentially burn her identity by formally sending her abroad under official cover at an embassy. She’d been productive over the years as an NOC, often traveling behind the Iron Curtain to support intelligence operations that required an outside touch.

Helen Gray’s skill and success in this specialized role put her in Saint Petersburg during the spring of 2003. A fateful assignment that would end two decades later with the kidnapping and murder of Donald Wilson, the point-blank killing of an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, and her own suicide.

Wilson’s name had been the third name provided to her by Sergei Kozlov, the retired GRU general she had been sent to meet in Saint Petersburg, during the spring of 2003. Brian Kelley had been the first. A “puzzling hors d’oeuvre” meant to whet the CIA’s appetite—his mom had a way with words. The FBI hadn’t been able to find a trace of him or his wife, Kathleen, in the United States prior to 1974.