“I wasn’t in love with Clarice, Laurel. You went and recreated her, put her face on yours, and the worst part of it is, I didn’t even love her.”

“Of course you loved her.”

“Why? Because Roth told you?”

“Because you went off the deep end when she died.”

“I didn’t go off the deep end.”

“Lance, it’s in the file.”

“Roth was the one who ordered her killed. Was that in the file?”

“What?”

“She was a traitor, Laurel. She’s the reason we were breached in the first place. The reason the Dead Hand even knows we exist. All of this, Mansfield getting ahead of us, our network being breached, the other assets being killed, all of that goes back to her. It all started with her speaking to the Dead Hand.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sure it does.”

“Why would Roth let me go ahead with the surgery if she was a traitor?”

“Because he knew it would work anyway.”

“Lance,” Laurel said, “why would it work anyway?”

He looked at her. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to feel the relief of someone else knowing what it was he was holding in. But he couldn’t do it.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

He started walking across the square toward the mausoleum.

“Why would it work anyway?” she said again, “If he knew you weren’t in love with her?”

He didn’t stop and she had to run after him again.

“Lance,” she said, “Lance, wait.”

76

Across the square, Lenin’s Mausoleum rose up from the ground like an ancient ziggurat.

Lance strode toward it and, Laurel, when she realized where he was headed, ran after him.

The square was dark and mostly empty, and the two guards stationed in front of the mausoleum watched them approach.

Lance didn’t think, he didn’t hesitate.

He drew a silenced handgun and shot both guards in the head from fifty feet away. They crumpled into two piles on the ground.

He hurried up the steps and pulled them into the mausoleum’s recessed entrance. Laurel pulled their large overcoats up over their faces.

“They’re not sleeping,” Lance said.

“You’re insane,” Laurel hissed.

He looked at her, then jumped and grabbed the ledge above him, pulling himself onto the first step of the mausoleum’s stepped structure.

He reached down to help her. She hesitated before giving him her hand.

The mausoleum walls were of smooth marble but they were able to climb it one step at a time. When they got to the top, they were forty feet above the square. They crouched and looked at the Kremlin walls in front of them, twenty feet higher still. Directly beneath them, inside the mausoleum, the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin lay on a stone altar, as it had for generations.

“The sensors are disabled?” Lance said.

Laurel nodded.