“How is that possible?” Lance said. “They were pros, Roth. If the Russians were onto Tatyana, she would have known.”

“She thought she was meeting you, Lance. We think that’s why she didn’t cut and run.”

“Me?”

“Laurel told her you’d be there. That’s why she went.”

39

Igor sat motionless at his desk for a long time. He couldn’t believe Tatyana was really dead.

She’d been so young.

The truth was, he’d always been fond of her.

She wasn’t like other women her age.

She was more like the women of his generation.

She hadn’t softened with the softening of history. She was still on a war footing. Stalin. Purges. Collectivization. Famines. Gulags. Police torture chambers. She’d known such things were real, and that they could all come back in the blink of an eye.

His other agents didn’t think that way. They didn’t believe. Not in their bones. They were like city folk who’d heard stories of bears and wolves in the forest but never seen them. How could they fear things they’d never seen?

Tatyana did fear them. She believed in every monster she’d ever heard of. And she lived her life as if they were always there, right behind her, ready to pounce.

And now they had.

Igor wasn’t like some of his colleagues who thought everything that came from America was decadent. He read American books and regarded their authors as highly as any of the Russian greats. It wasn’t Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Pushkin or Chekhov on the table next to his bed. It was an American.

“When the lambs is lost in the mountains, they is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”

He remembered that line now.

For Tatyana, it had always been the wolf.

And someone would pay.

He picked up his phone and called the secure switchboard. It would provide after-the-fact authorization for what had just happened in New York, and would protect him against any later charge that he’d turned on one of his own agents.

The switchboard was partially automated, and if nothing went wrong, his message would be recorded, stored, and no one would ever hear it. It was an insurance policy. If his loyalty was ever in question, he’d be able to refer to it, and show that Timokhin had forced his hand.

A woman with a lifeless voice picked up the phone and Igor said, “This is Igor Aralov with authorization from Direktor Fyodor Timokhin.”

“Target Russian agency?” the woman said.

“Main Directorate,” he said.

“Target Russian agent?”

“Tatyana Aleksandrova,” he said, amazed how easily the words came to him.

“Location?”

“Christopher Street metro station, New York.”

“Confirmation of death?”

Igor cleared his throat. “Target shot and hit by oncoming train.”

“Identity of assassin?”

“Classified.”

“Please hold,” the woman said.