“Is Yuri okay?” Alice said, hurrying to catch up. “Yuri?” she called.
“I am okay except for pistol aimed at me.”
“He’s on our side,” Alice said, breathlessly, following Carter’s mom to the living room, where a curvy, black-haired woman around Florence’s age had him at gunpoint, his hands up. His own weapon was on the floor. “This is Yuri, Nika’s ex.”
Florence holstered her gun. “He iswho,now?”
“Oh, such a long story, but it’d be great if you didn’t shoot him.”
Yuri slowly shifted his gaze from the gun and onto Florence. “What happened to my friend, in van outside?”
“Oh, we waved at him on the way in. Just two harmless little old ladies bringing home their shopping! Works every time. Rashida, safe to stand down.”
The other woman lowered her gun and went to shut the apartment door.
“The ring!” Alice said, looking at the tracker on her finger. “That’s how you found us?”
“It’s linked to my phone, like all of Carter’s surveillance equipment. Of course, I thought I was tracking Carter here. He was on a call to me when the Feds sprang him. He didn’t get away then?”
“He was taken by FBI,” Yuri said, warily lowering his hands.
“That would explain why someone tried to hack into his phone—Rashida had to turn it to zombie mode. Now Alice, you’d better fill me in, and fast.”
Alice gave a rundown while Yuri resumed looking through the documents. Rashida pulled her own laptop out of a sunflower-decorated shopping tote and sat beside him. She began cross-checking the names on the list and documents with some official-looking database, talking quietly with Yuri.
When Alice finished her update—which took a long time even though she skipped over the intimate details—Florence turned her attention to Rashida. “What’s it look like, hon?”
“Yeah, these documents seem to align with the names on the list. Though it’ll take several analysts weeks to truly get to the bottom of it all, and even then, that would be just the beginning. The kind of investigation that could take years. Now, Tania Garrett’s name isn’t coming up anywhere, in English or Russian, but there is a person with a codename of ‘The Leopard’ who seems to be spearheading the thing. Gotta be a coordinated, long-term campaign—some of these documents are ten years old.”
Yuri tapped the computer screen. “I think these were collected by FSB, for blackmail and bribery. So all these people betray America? Big, if true.”
“No wonder we’ve been at the mercy of Russia for so long,” Florence said, leaning over Yuri, a hand on the back of his chair. “Looks like they’ve infiltrated us at all sorts of levels.”
Alice leaned on the doorframe that separated the living room and the bedroom. “So maybe Nika had this stuff when she went to see the station chief, and planned to hand it over in exchange for repatriation, but then the guy was killed right in front of her, and she grabbed the passport and travel documents and things, and quickly changed plans.”
Florence picked up the plastic-enclosed list. “One of the names here—Benjamin Schneider. He interrogated Carter when they arrived in the U.S. We can assume he also interrogated Nika. Rashida, we’d better find out if he’s anywhere near Carter now. Who do we trust in the FBI?”
“You think Nika told him what she had on him and blackmailed him?” Alice said.
“Possibly. Along with the deputy director of the CIA. And there were a dozen others with an interest in keeping all this from getting out. She obviously played it all very smartly. Carter said a large amount of money had landed in her account justbefore she arrived in the U.S. Could have been from anyone along the chain.”
“Nika said on tape—the one Carter translated—that she had a meeting with Tatiana—Tania—in Moscow. A tense meeting. Maybe that’s where the money came from.”
“Sounds like she had everyone wrapped up, and terrified about what she’d do with the intel. It’s crazy that she didn’t have all this better secured.”
“She wasn’t very trusting,” Alice said. “Maybe she thought it was better off in her shoes than stored electronically. If any of it got out, plenty of people would be coming after her. And then, when she knew her cancer was terminal, she wrote the book to set the record straight, clear her conscience?”
“While keeping all this hidden?” Florence said, indicating a document that Yuri was scrolling through.
“I wonder if she’d planned to do more, but the illness picked up speed. She became so frantic near the end. She said in her last days that she needed to get something to Carter. Well—I assumenowshe was talking about Carter.”
Yuri’s phone rang, making them all jump. “Is my friend from Moscow,” he said, and answered it in Russian.
Alice and the two older women fell silent while Yuri spoke, their heads bowed as if they were trying to figure out what he was saying. As he listened, he went to the laptop and accessed his email.
“Okay,” he said, hanging up. “There is one SD card left behind at shop. It showed up after Nika disappeared. It has one thing on it—a video. My friend has sent me. I will play.”
Alice could hardly breathe as they gathered to watch. It was security camera footage of a snowy residential city street.
