“Damn straight. Nothing like it. Regular life sucks. Too much boring shit in your head, all the time.” He pushed off from the counter. “You cold? Should I get wood?”
“Not at all. In fact,” she said, standing, “I might go outside for a bit. Get some fresh air.” Not that there’d been a shortage of that today, but the cabin was so intimate she was having trouble breathing. Could you get hypoxia just from feeling attracted to someone? And yes, she’d spent a lot of the afternoon cuddling into him, but speaking face to face seemed like a leveling up.
“I might join you,” he said. “Too quiet in here.” He followed her outside and sat on a wooden bench on the porch. Had he sat on the same seat with his wife? Instead of sitting beside him, Alice leaned on the railing, facing the same way. The colors were leaching from the trees, the shadows spreading, the blue of the sky melding into black.
“All that digital stuff… Was that why the operations in the novel were so low-tech? I did question Nika about all the dead drops and brush passes that the heroine and her assets used. It seemed unlikely that these people—and many of them were in IT—would use such pedestrian techniques in the twenty-first century. It all seemed very Cold War. I suggested we use the dark web, cryptography, fun stuff like that. But Nika was adamant that with all the digital tracing around these days, it was more plausible to go old school. One of the dead-drop locations we initially had in the book was a store, and the owner would put a coded message into her marketing posts on social media to indicate there was something for Galina to pick up, but that was as high-tech as it got.”
“Technology can’t see inside people’s heads—yet—but conversations with actual people can. I’m making up for the lack of gadgets now, though. I’m playing around with some fun ones—some prototypes an ex-CIA contact made for me.”
“Like the camera trap you set up?”
“That’s nothing. I have a regular-looking tie clip that’s a voice recorder. You press it, and it records to the cloud. Of course, I never wear a tie so we need to rethink that. I have a pendant that uploads live video to the cloud. Plus GPS trackers. But, like I say, it mostly all comes down to talking to people. Regular old-fashioned HUMINT.”
“Human intelligence,” she said, remembering her research. “You mentioned a ‘we.’ Who’s ‘we’?”
“I occasionally contract a handful of trusted people. How come the dead drop at the store wasn’t in the book?”
“It ended up on the cutting room floor—Nika’s call, which was a shame. I thought it was cool.”
“Around the time we started the Moscow operation, there’d been a lot of high-profile hacks—CIA employees and agents being exposed, that kind of thing. That was why we set up thenetwork like we did. Pretty much nothing went onto a computer until it was transmitted securely from the embassy’s code room, and even then I’d get nervous. Sometimes I’d wait until I’d crossed into Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, if I was taking the train out, and leave my intel at dead drops for colleagues working out of embassies there. The assets we had in the Kremlin knew only too well how fragile the CIA’s systems were, and were careful to wipe identifying data from anything that could be tracked back to them. Some of the higher-ups thought our skepticism was ridiculous and pressured us to use more tech, since they were spending millions—billions—on it, but over time we proved them wrong. As far as I know, we shut down the network with no lives lost. If the Russians had gotten their hands on Nika… If she had to die, I’m relieved it was a peaceful end.”
Alice took an audible breath.
“It wasn’t peaceful?”
“No, sure, it was.”
She sensed him standing. “Alice?” he said, stepping up beside her. “The truth?”
“Itwaspeaceful,” she said, staring into the trees.
“Then what are you not telling me?”
“Right at the end it was peaceful, when she was too sedated to fight anymore.”
“But…”
“But cancer… It’s brutal.” Alice looked down at her boots. They were speckled with mud. One of his was worn on the top—from shifting gears?
“How long ago did your mom and sister die?” he said quietly.
“My mom three years ago—she was sick for a long time. My sister just over a year.”
“That same cancer?”
“Defective gene, the doctors say.”
“Jesus. That sucks.”
Alice made the mistake of looking up at his face. His eyes were wide with the horror of a complete stranger randomly oversharing, and a wish to be anywhere else. Shit. She’d gone there. “I’m hungry,” she declared, pivoting, and striding into the cabin. She wasn’t the slightest bit hungry. She could never eat when her stomach got that hollow grief-y feeling. Between that and the way it was flipping with nerves at being in such close confines… Who needed keto?
Predictably, her morbid episode brought the mood down, and they ate the chicken wraps she’d bought in silence but for the calls of birds settling in for the night. They sat side-by-side on the bench, their eyes trained on the view as if there were something more interesting to watch than trees growing. Well,heate. She picked.
“So that was hands-down the craziest day of my life,” she said, overly brightly.
“Itwaspretty crazy.”
She studied his profile. The low light emphasized the cut of his cheekbones, the smoothness of his skin before it transitioned into stubble.He shot Alice a sideways look, that very distinctive mouth kinking. Great. Now she’d been busted staring.
