Page 97 of Denied Access

Zeke tucked the handset between his shoulder and cheek, slipped a quarter into the coin slot, and dialed a local number.

The phone rang four times.

On the fifth, someone answered.

“Eddie’s Dry Cleaning.”

The speaker sounded American.

He was not.

“Yes,” Zeke said, “I was calling to see if my suit and tie were ready?”

“Name?”

“Brad Smith.”

“Just a minute, Mr. Smith. Lemme check.”

Zeke turned toward the front of the store. The man behind the register had gone back to his paper. In a city that ran on leaks, there was nothing particularly unusual about a well-dressed man ducking into a gas station to use a pay phone.

At least that’s what Zeke hoped.

“Okay, sir, I’ve got your slip right here. You can pick up any time after five tonight.”

“Great, thank you.”

Zeke hung up the phone, paid for the beer, and ran back to his car.

The rain was coming down harder now, which made his job more difficult. Difficult, but not impossible. Ideally, he would wait a day or two before making the drop, but the urgent nature of his conversation with Jeremy left him no choice. Moscow was eight hours ahead of DC.

The clock was ticking.

After pulling out of the gas station, Zeke shot west across the Potomac River into Virginia. He didn’t have time to run a full SDR, but with DC traffic, it wasn’t hard to fake missing an exit in order to justify looping back onto the highway to check if he was being followed. Eventually his travels brought him to Quincy Street in Arlington and the Central Library. Ducking inside, he asked for and was quickly granted permission to use one of the public internet terminals.

After taking his seat in a worn plastic chair, Zeke opened up an internet browser. Then he launched the computer’s word-processing software. In simple, concise language, he transcribed his conversation with Jeremy. Then he reviewed the document for accuracy and printed the single page. Closing out both the browser and the word processor, Zeke stopped by the circulation desk to pay the dime for his printout. With a final smile for the pretty librarian, Zeke accepted the paper, ensuring he only touched the document by its bottommost edge. After exiting the library, he got behind the wheel of his BMW.

This was the point at which he felt most vulnerable.

Zeke did not consider himself a traitor.

A traitor steals secrets from his own country, and this definition did not apply to him. Though his passport said otherwise, in his heart he was a citizen of his mother’s birth nation—the Soviet Union, or now Russia. As he’d affirmed to the examiner numerous times during his polygraph, Zeke had never passed information to foreign intelligence officers.

He had, however, passed information to Russian intelligence officers.

Reams of it.

Zeke wasn’t a traitor, but he was a spy.

The BMW again took Zeke west, this time toward a little park in Wolf Trap, Virginia, about fourteen miles from Arlington. Though his periodic lie detector tests had never given him a problem, Zeke was not so glib about the counterintelligence capabilities of the many three-letter agencies that actively hunted people like him. He thought of himself as Russian, and planned to relocate to his homeland someday, but he was not about to trust his safety to the KGB.

Accordingly, he’d never met face-to-face with his handler, nor did he plan to do so until he was ready to leave America for good. Instead he’d volunteered to spy via letter and had insisted on dictating his contact procedures rather than allowing the KGB, now SVR, to take the initiative.

One of those procedures had been the partially drawn blinds in the row house across the street from his favorite pub. Another had been the call he’d just placed to the fictional dry cleaner. In the first instance, his Russian handler had been signaling a need for immediate information to follow up Zeke’s last dump. In the second, he’d told the Russians to expect something at the dead drop tonight.

In a bit of luck, the rain had mostly stopped by the time Zeke arrived at Foxstone Park. After parking the BMW next to a paved footpath, he pulled on a pair of gloves taken from his jacket’s pockets, folded the paper, and then carefully ripped away the portion containing his fingerprints. Next he folded the remaining document severalmore times before placing it in a Ziploc bag he’d removed from the glove box. After sealing the plastic bag, he exited the car and followed the asphalt into the trees. The footpath roughly mirrored a twisting creek, and he strolled along contentedly until he came to a small bridge that spanned the stream.

This was the moment of truth.