“In all the times I’ve been up here, I never knew these cabins existed,” Alice said, stepping in as he switched on a light. Inside, it was definitely more romantic getaway than horror film: stone fireplace, cheerful kitchenette, more striped walls, a neatly made bed that could ambitiously be called a double, a little door thatled to a bathroom. It smelled of wood and floor cleaner. Not a lot of room for two people if they weren’t sharing the bed.
“You’ve been up here? Shit, I didn’t think you might have ties to the place. Who would know that?”
“Just day hikes with my sisters—there’s a trail that must come within a couple of miles of here—but I haven’t come up for years. You won’t find many people in Montrose who haven’t been up in these mountains. Except Nika. She’d never have disgraced her arches by wearing hiking boots, for starters.”
Alice went to sit on the bed, thought better of it, and instead chose one of a pair of wooden chairs that encircled a tiny table. When she looked up again, Carter was staring at the kitchenette as if someone were standing there. And maybe, for him, there was.
“She definitely wouldn’t have,” he said distantly.
“How strange that she came to Montrose when you had a history here, of sorts,” Alice said, sensing he could use a distraction. “It’s not the kind of place that people visit—not particularly charming or historic, not en route to anywhere. Even if you were into the outdoors, there are towns that are far closer.A nice place to live but you wouldn’t want to visit—that’s the unofficial town slogan.”
He sucked in a breath through gritted teeth as he unpacked their food supplies. He looked out of proportion with the cabin, an adult in a child’s playhouse. She felt at the same time in awe of his physical presence and a little cowed by it. “I doubt it was a coincidence.”
“Meaning?”
“When I was in Russia, my cover story was that I’d grown up around here. Nika knew that, but I didn’t think she believed it was real, and I didn’t think for a second she would come here, or I would have gone looking.” He turned and leaned back on the counter. It put him as far across the room from Alice as hecould be, but he could still close the distance in a few strides if he wanted to. “I can’t work out if it was sentimental, a whim, or she wanted me to find her. All this time, she was so close. I used to see her in the street, all the time—though of course it was never actually her.”
Like Alice did, with her mother and sister. Like Holt did, with his wife. Ghosts everywhere. “I did ask her why she came to Montrose—it’s the first question you ask anyone. She said it sounded like a nice, quiet place to live and it had a good hospital, which I thought was weird, given that it’s a town no one’s ever heard of. But then she always changed the conversation when I asked about her past. I got the sense she’dlived, but in the time I knew her, her days revolved around hospital visits, talking about the book, and writing it. No one ever contacted her and she never contacted anyone, as far as I knew. I always thought how sad that was, but she obviously didn’t want to talk about it. I figured keeping busy with the book was a distraction, a tonic for the loneliness, the urge to leave a mark—but do you think it was a driving urge to get the story out before she died? I don’t know why she didn’t just tell me the truth.”
“Maybe she thought she’d scare you off. And like I said, she would have signed an NDA. Not that the Pubs Committee would normally care what any foreign ex-agent writes. It’s all deniable—one loose cannon’s word against the Company’s. No one really trusts an agent.”
“But you trusted her, right? And it certainly sounds like they’re taking this seriously.”
“Because it pertains to an open, high-profile investigation. Cogs are turning and I’d like to shift them in a way that doesn’t lead to me.”
“Was the Montrose cover story your idea?”
“Yeah. I had no actual ties to the place, and like you say, it was obscure enough to be believable—peak middle-classAmerica, and the last place you’d expect a spy to hail from. If you google my alias and the name of your high school, you’ll find just enough hits to look genuine.”
“Really?”
“Solid B student who excelled at languages, mediocre baseball player, dipped in and out of photography club, worked part-time at the hardware store on Main Street that no longer exists, got my first driver’s license at the local DMV, got my appendix out at the hospital. The average Joe whose name sounds familiar and is on the school’s official records but you can’t quite place, fifteen or twenty years later.”
“The CIA did all that?”
“You don’t remember me from school?”
“Pretty sure I’d recall.”
“The story was designed to hold up in Moscow, not Montrose. They created a parallel life. It helped that I’d been special ops for so long—I didn’t have much of a digital footprint compared with most of our generation, so it was easier to set up a false trail. I’ve still never had a social media account under my real name.”
“Makes you almost the last of our kind.”
“It’s nearly impossible to create a parallel life now. Aliases are hard to pull off. Not just social media histories and web footprints, but biometric data, airport records, credit histories, digitization, globalization, ‘secure’ government databases getting hacked… The game has changed. It’s not like in the old movies where you have five passports in your secret vault and you flick between them. It’s hard enough to maintain a single alias, let alone multiple ones.”
“I read somewhere that Russia and China have pretty much stopped using aliases at all—that their newer agents in the U.S. use their birth names and pose as diplomats or businesspeople.”
“That’s why it was so gutting to have to shut down my Russian operation. It’s not like I could simply move on to working in, say, Beijing. If the Russians were onto me, you have to assume the Chinese government knew about it—everyone has eyes everywhere. There are several countries I’ll never be able to visit again, including some of our allies. There’s only a few places left I could get away with doing fieldwork—deep cover, at that—if I can even get my job back at the end of this.”
“So you lost your job because of what happened with Nika?”
“Long story.”
“Huh.”
He laughed bitterly. “I’m not avoiding the question. Truth is, I never found out exactly why I was forced out. I mean, sure, I was caught with my pants down with an asset, but there was more to it. They interrogated me, and then suddenly they let me go. And I never saw Nika again.”
“But you want your job back? After everything that’s happened?”
