Page 100 of Denied Access

Rapp stared at the woman he loved.

He couldn’t help it.

Greta always looked stunning, but in that moment her face was radiant.

And then it fell.

“Was? Opa? Opa!”

Rapp reflexively hammered the accelerator as he tightened his grip on the steering wheel. Greta took the phone from her ear and dialed.

“Put it on speaker,” Rapp said.

She looked at him, nodded, and then pressed the appropriate button.

The phone call went unanswered.

Greta made to dial again, but Rapp reached over and covered his hand with hers. “What did you hear?”

The face that had been so full of life just moments ago was now drawn and pale. “He said my name and then something else.”

“What?”

“Run.”

CHAPTER 55

MOSCOW, RUSSIA

IRENEKennedy counted up five floors on the US embassy building as she drove past. As per the Russian volunteer’s instructions, a single light remained lit in the chief of station’s office. The sun had set about an hour ago, and with darkness shrouding the city, the light could have been cast by a distant star rather than a simple desk lamp. Irene liked that analogy. A single star in an otherwise dark sky was cause for making a wish. As her SUV carried her west on Bolshoy Deviatinsky, Irene fervently wished for luck in tonight’s operation.

Her team was going to need it.

“Ma’am, are you sure we can’t talk you out of this?”

Irene smiled at the honorific.

She’d made such progress in prodding her protective detail to call her by her first name, but that headway had been lost the moment she’d proposed something crazy to her agents.

“We’ve been over this, Fred,” Irene said. “I understand your concern, but my entire team is putting it on the line this evening. I’ve got to do my part.”

“You’re the boss, Chief,” Fred Burton said from the front passenger seat.

Her driver, once again Brett Maryott, didn’t say anything at all, but he did activate his right-turn signal in order to merge with the traffic on Konyushkovskaya Street.

She considered his silence a win.

Like her team of case officers, her protective detail was not big on her decision to participate in tonight’s festivities. Brett completed his turn and goosed the SUV’s accelerator, pressing Irene back into her seat. “We’ve got company.”

“Confirmed,” Fred said as he looked in the side-view mirror. “Our Russian friends are out tonight in force.”

“Not to worry,” Irene said. “I have it on good authority that the FSK will be on their best behavior.”

The DSS agents’ lack of response spoke volumes.

Stansfield had phoned just prior to her leaving the embassy to confirm that the Russian deputy chief of mission and his spouse were being expelled based on an issue with the spouse’s visa. Since the pair hadn’t been formally declared persona non grata, the interaction hadn’t risen to the level of an international incident, but a message had been delivered all the same. The pair were going to be flown back to Moscow on a State Department jet, and the jet would not return to America until Kris Henrik was aboard. The CIA’s Moscow Station should be free to operate this evening without fear of the employees’ families bearing the repercussions for their actions.

At least that was the hope.