“Danielle was a CIA courier. Perfect cover, right? She goes to Russia often on business. Material could be given to her that she could take out of the country. Documents you would not want transmitted through the internet. Or photos. She picked up material from agents the CIA had recruited. Anya was my girlfriend, and the CIA turned her against me with lies and deceptions. She stopped when she realized she was pregnant. But she made the mistake of telling Danielle, her handler. And Danielle talked her into giving up the baby. She’d done it once before. I didn’t even know she was pregnant, but I had told her, no babies. Back then I didn’t want kids. Anya was afraid of angering me, so she left me; she went off to model, she said, as she’d done before. And she had Sasha. But Danielle had told her CIA bosses about my baby, and they decided that baby was valuable. That baby was leverage to be used against me, my own blood, safely adopted by an American family and held out as a carrot to me to get me to give them what they wanted on the Russian president, his inner circle, the most powerful men and women in Russia.

“But after you all killed Anya, they abandoned that plan. No one wanted to have to explain where Anya was when the question would come up. Danielle told the Agency that Anya had died, killed by you and your husband, and the CIA decided not to use my child as leverage against me. And once Russia stopped allowing adoptions, Danielle became less useful to them.”

The people following Danielle in Moscow—the men in the fancy cars. Conduits to Anya, or other informants. “The woman who warned me off adopting Grant…”

“The CIA division that Danielle worked for was torn. One side felt it was wrong to use a child as a tool—or that it was too risky, that I could simply go to the Russian press and say the CIA helped get my child adopted by an American family and I never knew. They did not want you to adopt Sasha. They wanted Anya to return to spying on me, and with a child in her arms, she and I would be even closer, they thought. She had been a steady source of important information.” His voice was bitter.

The warning woman, Iris thinks. The bribe. The CIA would pay that much to keep an informant close to one of the most powerful men in Russia. It was a pittance to them.

“The other side wanted the adoption to go through—so Sasha could be leverage if ever needed, kept close to a family near Danielle. But they abandoned that, of course, after Anya vanished.” Mike shrugs. “Does it matter? You and Kyle and Danielle killed my woman and took my child.”

“Why would Danielle help you now?”