Page 82 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

Nataliya Turner, no longer Inessa Turgeneva, stood in the courtyard between the Old and New Headquarters Buildings of the CIA.

Her dark hair, now dyed silver, hung long about her face, hiding her cheekbones and jawline from facial recognition software.

Unlike many, it hadn’t aged her appearance but rather elevated her to the heights of elegant sophistication.

Her clothes were no longer her own designs, but she was enjoying an exploration of Versace, McCartney, and others, without the pressure to create anything beyond her own personal style.

Her escort / armed bodyguard waited quietly off to the side.

The CIA courtyard was a lovely space in many ways: a small park, a peaceful place between the storms within the two buildings.

The March morning was chilly, but so much warmer than a Moscow winter that she hadn’t bothered to button her full-length Prada cashmere coat.

She sat on a stone bench and faced the enigmatic sculpture that stood there.

A great bronze wave three meters—ten feet high, she corrected herself, she was in America now—and twenty feet long.

No more than seven or eight centimeters thick, whatever that might be in their arcane inches.

Like a great sheet of paper stood on its long side, then pressed in from each end until it made a soft S-shape, it dominated this end of the garden.

The entire surface was riddled with hand-tall letter-shaped perforations.

Kryptos. She remembered Miranda describing how her father had attempted to hone her curious brain into a cryptography machine.

Pushing her to decipher the codes the artist had embedded there, sections of which still stumped cryptographers thirty-five years later.

What a strange childhood that must have been.

Her multiple attempts to speak with Miranda had not gone as she’d imagined. Rather than bonding over Miranda’s parents being her mentors, each tale she told to Miranda drove them farther apart. It was hard to imagine they were talking about the same people.

Nataliya was used to understanding people, easily becoming fast friends and confidants. Not this time. She was no code breaker but, unlike Miranda, she could appreciate the metaphor of Kryptos standing between them—her and her Little Sister—a wall that she didn’t know how to breach.

Hidden codes applied to her future as well. Stepping into the world of the American’s Central Intelligence Agency was an opportunity with a thousand hidden ramifications as complex and full of subtle meanings as the sculpture before her. At least this was a terrain she understood well.

Though no longer a billionaire, she’d extracted the bulk of her wealth from Russia before the international sanctions and her death.

She could afford a life of luxury anywhere in the world.

But luxury beyond her clothes had never driven her, except as a tool to engage others.

No, it was the beating heart that fascinated her; the pulse of humanity that might be shifted or used to make the world a better place to live in.

She had maintained a delicate thread of communication with the head of the CIA’s Russia Desk, Valentina Mills; a connection originally set up by Holly Harper.

And, starting today, that connection would become side-by-side offices within this mighty bastion of clandestine knowledge.

She knew precisely who to reach out to of her former contacts, never revealing who she truly was, of course, but perhaps Inessa’s Salon would live on under another name.

By some impossible path, her training by Miranda’s parents and the resulting connection to her Little Sister Miranda had led her to sitting here before Kryptos.

“She loves this damn thing.” Nataliya didn’t turn at Director Clarissa Reese’s approach, letting the symbols of the curious path opening before her play across the sculpture’s surface.

“Miranda loves and hates it, I believe,” she said as Clarissa sat beside her. Over these last months of debriefings and the pursuant negotiations about Nataliya’s possible work at the CIA, they had come to appreciate each other as sparring partners.

“Loves and hates. Much like this place.”

At that she turned and saw the weariness on Clarissa’s face. She might be able to hide it from others, but Nataliya knew it too well from observing their sparring…and from her own mirror.

She also saw the pain. The pain of so much being ripped away.

Of being a woman standing alone against all comers.

Miranda had her Andi. Holly had her Mike.

Who did Clarissa have with the death of her friend Rose?

Who did she herself? Some questions were too hard at the present. So she chose another.

“Tell me about the parts you love.”

A few minutes’ planned welcome became a quiet hour. To Nataliya’s surprise, Clarissa’s passion for her country matched her own for Russia. Except, her own passion had been misplaced; her beloved country was past saving. She hoped, oh how she hoped, that Clarissa’s was not.