Page 24 of Denied Access (Mitch Rapp #24)

M OSCOW , R USSIA

S HE heard words, but they seemed to be coming from far away. As if the voice were echoing down a long drainage pipe. Kris groaned and tried to rub the grit from her eyes.

She couldn’t.

A tightness in her wrist brought her arm up short.

A metallic tightness.

Groaning again, Kris Henrik forced open her eyes.

“There you are! Would you like a glass of water? You must be terribly thirsty.”

Blinking away the blurriness, Kris tried to make sense of her surroundings. The single light bulb dangling from the ceiling didn’t do much to beat back the shadows. She could see bare concrete walls shrouded in darkness and a face sitting across the table from her.

A familiar face.

“Where—” Kris coughed. “Where am I?”

The man standing over her still resembled a grandfather, but his cold smile and hard eyes suggested otherwise.

The Russian reached for Kris, and she jerked away.

Or at least she tried to.

It was then that her woozy brain made sense of the tightness binding her wrist. She was manacled to the table.

“Please don’t struggle,” the Russian said. “You’ll only hurt yourself. The table is bolted to the floor, as is your chair. Believe me when I say there is absolutely nowhere you can go.”

“Why—”

Again, the hoarseness in her voice betrayed her. Kris tried to swallow, but her mouth was bone-dry and her throat felt like sandpaper.

“Here,” the man said, pushing a glass of water to within reach.

“Take a drink. The drug we used to sedate you is wonderfully fast-acting, but I’m afraid that it isn’t without side effects.

Waking up after suffering its effects has been termed the world’s worst hangover. The water will help. I promise.”

As if his words made her aware of the rest of her body, Kris realized her head was pounding in time with her heartbeat. A wave of nausea roiled her stomach and bile raced up her throat.

“Drink. Please.”

Kris couldn’t see what was in the glass, but decided she didn’t care.

She’d been at their mercy while unconscious, and she was still just as helpless.

If the Russian intelligence officer harbored malicious intentions, they certainly weren’t dependent on her ingesting whatever was in the cup.

Bringing the glass to her lips, she took a sip.

Water.

Choking back the urge to sob, she finished the glass in two long swallows.

Perhaps it was just her imagination, but the headache seemed to ease.

Even better, her mouth and throat no longer felt like she’d been gargling with gravel.

Setting the glass back on the table with shaking fingers, Kris cleared her throat and tried again.

“Where am I?”

“Exactly where you’d expect to be, I’d expect. Lubyanka Square.”

“What? Why?”

“Because that’s the location of my intelligence service’s headquarters. Conveniently, it is also where we interrogate traitors and spies.”

For a long moment, the Russian’s words seemed to be lost in the fog enveloping Kris’s thoughts. She didn’t understand what the man was getting at.

Then she got it.

Like a fuzzy scene suddenly snapping into focus, she saw her accommodations for what they were—a prison cell.

“Spy?” Kris said. “I’m not a spy.”

“Of course you are, and a very good one too, but I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Lieutenant General Grigoriy Petrov. I’ve served my nation for over fifty years, first in the NKVD, then the KGB, and now in our counterintelligence service. Your name is Kris Henrik, and you are a CIA officer.”

“What?” Kris said. “I—”

“Using your husband as a distraction was brilliant by the way. Absolutely brilliant. We know all about the American initiative in which green CIA officers are sent to Moscow posing as low-level diplomats. Since this is their first overseas tour, we don’t focus on them, especially since their embassy cover jobs aren’t ones typically utilized by case officers.

But you’ve taken things to an entirely new level. Bravo!”

Kris bit her lip, trying to understand what had transpired.

Petrov was speaking to the exact reason she and Barry were in Moscow.

Contrary to his State Department cover, Barry was a CIA officer.

A CIA officer on his first operational tour.

Moscow was a hard nut to crack, and Russian counterintelligence officers were famous for their rough-and-tumble method of operating against foreign intelligence services.

Someone had coined the term Moscow Rules to describe the intense, often physical interactions the men and women of the CIA’s Moscow Station negotiated on a daily basis.

With alarming frequency, the KGB seemed to know which CIA officer was replacing whom before the person even arrived in-country.

Good spies had a penchant for remembering faces, and the proliferation of computers allowed for the much more rapid dissemination of photographs taken of suspected American CIA officers.

Russian counterintelligence officers could now identify agency case officers the moment they stepped off the plane at Sheremetyevo International Airport by referencing a database of pictures.

The solution to this problem was as elegant as it was simple—send unknown case officers to Moscow.

This is what the CIA officer who had put Kris through her paces had explained during the classroom portion of her training.

Along with a handful of other wives, and a female case officer’s less-than-enthused husband, the spouses of the Moscow-bound junior officers had been subjected to a week of specialized training geared at preparing them for the rigors of their pending Russia posting.

The exercise had culminated with a mock arrest and interrogation that had felt very real.

Apparently, Kris hadn’t been alone in this assessment, as the red eyes of several of her fellow spouses could attest. At the conclusion of the training, the same plainspoken CIA instructor had assured his audience that the Russians, while hard, still adhered to the unwritten rules that had governed interactions between adversarial intelligence services for decades.

Moscow Rules might be the order of the day for their CIA officer husbands or wives, but a Russian counterintelligence officer would never lay a hand on an American spouse.

“You are mistaken,” Kris said, this time putting a bit of steel into her voice. “I’m a housewife. Nothing more.”

Her indignation didn’t come so much from a newfound sense of courage as much as that what she said was true.

While the spouses had been provided with a bit of rudimentary training, they were not employees of the Central Intelligence Agency and were not expected to conduct themselves as such.

Sure, Kris had known that Barry was going to unload a dead drop in a location near St. Clement’s Church, but she had nothing to do with that.

Her role had been to sit on the bench outside and look pretty.

Literally.

Russian men loved Western women. Barry’s boss, the chief of Moscow Station, believed that an almost six-foot-tall former collegiate athlete with shoulder-length, flame-colored hair wearing an above-the-knee dress would make an excellent decoy.

“Stop, please,” Petrov said. “Your denials are pointless. I have a job to do, just as you do. Admitting your intention to commit espionage against my nation is just a formality at this point, but it’s still an important part of the repatriation process.”

“I told you,” Kris said, “I am not a spy. My husband works for the State Department. This is our first overseas posting and—”

“I’m not interested in Barry. I want to know about you.”

The man’s grandfatherly affect had melted away, and Kris didn’t care for what remained.

Petrov no longer resembled a favorite great-uncle or a demanding but fair professor emeritus.

Instead he looked devoid of human emotion.

Someone confronted with an unpleasant task he was nonetheless duty bound to complete.

Kris shivered. “There’s not much to say about me. I lived in Russia before and I wanted to spend our posting exploring Moscow and working on an idea I had for a novel. I—”

“Enough!” Petrov leaned forward to shout into her face. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but you’ve forced my hand.” Turning, he faced the mirror to Kris’s right. “Bring it in!”

She’d seen enough cop shows to have suspected that the glass was two-way, but the validation was still alarming.

This was actually happening. She was being interrogated by a Russian counterintelligence officer.

The door swung inward, and two men entered pushing a cart between them.

Kris gulped, convinced that the anemic light would flicker off gleaming implements of torture, but to her relief, this wasn’t the case.

Rather than blades, pliers, mallets, or rusty jumper cables clipped to a car battery, the cart carried something unexpected—a traditional Russian wooden matryoshka doll and a small plastic bag.

“Look familiar?” Petrov said.

“Not in the slightest,” Kris said.

Petrov frowned. Now he resembled a headmaster confronting a particularly troublesome student. “You’re determined to play this farce to its conclusion, I see?”

Kris shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Rather than answer, Petrov snapped his fingers. The bulkier of the two men emptied that Ziploc bag and a circular, metallic object about the size of a dime fell onto the cart.

“Microfilm,” Petrov said. “A dated but still highly effective way to commit espionage. Using a matryoshka doll as a dead drop was a brilliant piece of fieldwork, by the way. They can be found in any of the multiple souvenir shops adjacent to the church. Of course, most of those dolls lack this one’s hidden compartment. ”

“I’m sorry,” Kris said, her head spinning. “I—”