“Anya and Mike—I mean Mikhail.”

“Yes.”

“They both were on the CIA payroll?”

“Mikhail was one of our key assets. He’d been identified as a possible successor to the president. You can imagine our interest in him, and our desire to protect him as a source. Anya we paid to keep an eye on him, to make sure he didn’t lie to us, but he didn’t know that, at least then.”

“That was why you offered us money not to adopt Grant. To keep him in Russia, so she could go back to Mike with a child and be closer to him than ever.”

She nods. “We tried everything to dissuade you.”

“You could have killed us.”

“The operative assigned to follow you…went rogue that day.”

“I saw a picture of him on that flash drive. The man called Marland, standing next to a damaged SUV, just like the one that hit us. Marland was CIA.”

Jill looks uncomfortable for a moment, then takes a deep breath. “Yes. He was very protective of Ivanov. An asset like Ivanov was unique. What if the Russian president has a heart attack? Ivanov was one of the five top contenders to be next in line back then. But Anya had already burned her bridges with the orphanage system the first time. They weren’t going to give her back Sasha when she decided she’d be better off going back to Ivanov.”

Iris stares at her.

Jill shakes her head. “They were really a pair. The high-placed Russian billionaire whom we couldn’t bribe, but we could let him invest and grow his money in the West, where other Russians couldn’t get ahold of it if he fell from power, and the poor young model who loved him but became increasingly unstable under the pressure. You know, Danielle could never meet directly with Mike. He’d send people to her hotel. Those guys going to hotels full of Western business types wasn’t suspicious.”

“And Marland was CIA. But here he was working for Mike…”

“Yes. Marland was a former field operative in Russia who became Mike’s handler after we dropped Danielle when Anya died. His real name was Patrick Crawford. He got close…too close, too chummy with Mike. Marland was greedy. Marland would keep him informed of certain CIA activities in Russia or neighboring countries, and Mike used the information to stay in power, to expand his influence. And he set up very nice financial accounts for Marland under a range of names. Marland left the CIA with no crimes proven, but under a cloud. Before he left, he managed to get the Agency’s forensic file with photos and details of the team’s processing of the scene in the abandoned town after Danielle reported that Anya was dead—a murder she blamed on you and Kyle.”

“That’s who Danielle called…a CIA team. To clean up the mess.”