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FBI H EADQUARTERS

T UESDAY MORNING

F BI special agent Jennifer Fields set a cardboard coffee carrier atop a stack of file boxes and, looking around the suite of dingy basement offices, asked, “What’s this? Are we the fucking X Files now?”

As a rule, her boss, supervisory special agent Joe Carolan, didn’t care for profanity. But when it came to his number two, he had learned to let it slide.

They were from different generations. He had been at the Bureau longer than anyone could remember and was nearing the end of his career. Fields, on the other hand, was less than eight years in and had nothing but wide-open space in front of her.

“Welcome to anonymity,” he replied, waving her over and clearing some room for her to sit.

Pulling one of the large black coffees from the carrier, she handed it to him saying, “Your Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino.”

Carolan stood six feet four, weighed two-fifty, and could swing from a calm, highly skilled investigator to a bite-your-head-off-and-breathe-fire-down-your-neck monster if you wasted his time.

Colleagues had long ago taken to calling him “Bear.” Somedays that meant Gentle Ben.

Others it meant full-on, bloodthirsty grizzly.

From day one, however, Fields had made it clear that she wasn’t going to let his size or his demeanor intimidate her.

Embarrassing Carolan, who only took his coffee black, with ridiculous-sounding coffee orders, had been one of her ways of keeping him in check.

It had become their running joke and she did it whether they were alone, like now, or in a room full of people.

That was the kind of relationship they had built.

Shaking his head, Carolan thanked her, peeled back the lid, and blew some of the steam off the surface. “When did you ever watch a single episode of The X Files ?”

She shot him a surprised look. “Black people can’t watch X Files ?”

“Jesus, not again.”

“Or,” she continued, “are you saying that people from Harlem are just too poor to have TVs?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Carolan replied, rolling his eyes. “Give me a break. Your dad was a cop. Your mom was a nurse. You weren’t that poor. You went to Penn, for crying out loud. And this isn’t a Black-White thing. It’s an age thing. X Files was before your time.”

Fields smiled. She loved needling him. “My grandma, actually, was a fan. A pretty big one. She had all the episodes on VHS. Whenever she took care of me, we’d watch together.”

“That’s great. Now I feel old. Thank you for that. I’m sorry I asked.”

“Technically,” Fields said, correcting him, “I asked. What is all this? What are we doing down here?”

“Hiding.”

“No shit. From who?”

“The new administration,” Carolan replied.

“Does the director know?”

“Nope.”

Fields smiled again, even broader this time. “Look at you. Big, bad Joe Carolan breaking the rules.”

“A, this wasn’t my idea. And B, don’t think for a second that I like it. In fact, it turns my stomach.”

“Then whose idea was it?”

“Gallo’s.”

Alan Gallo was head of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, under which the Russia Operations Section, known in Bureau shorthand as CROS, was housed.

The mandate of CROS was to hunt down and disrupt all Russian cyber and intelligence activities that threatened the United States. It was the department that Carolan and Fields called home.

Back in November, the pair had torpedoed a sophisticated Russian influence operation and in the process had rolled up a valuable, deep-cover Russian intelligence officer.

The man had wisely been willing to negotiate a new, free life in the West rather than go to prison.

He turned out to be a treasure trove of information, and both Carolan and Fields had received commendations for their work. Then came the inauguration.

At forty-four years old, James Alexander Mitchell was the youngest U.S.

president since John F. Kennedy. The youthful, charismatic candidate had won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College and his margin of victory had been unassailable.

The campaign, however, had been brutal, especially near the end.

As a Russian studies major, Mitchell had spent his junior year of college abroad, living and studying in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Novosibirsk.

Though his political opponents had tried to use it against him, his fearless embrace of his time overseas had only endeared him further to voters.

But one particular smear had come close to toppling his campaign and had angered him beyond measure.

While studying in Russia, he had fallen in love with a beautiful young Russian woman. He wasn’t the first American to fall in love while living abroad and he certainly wouldn’t be the last. This woman, however, was noteworthy.

She was from a prominent Russian military family. Her father had close ties to the Kremlin and Russian military intelligence. She herself would go on to work for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, also known as the SVR.

It didn’t matter that the affair had happened over two decades ago, nor that Mitchell had ended up marrying his high school sweetheart and that they had two wonderful young children.

His opponents had tried to paint him as a ticking Russian time bomb; a deep-cover “Manchurian candidate” who couldn’t be trusted to place America’s interests above Russia’s.

President Mitchell had never told anyone about Anna. Social media hadn’t even become a thing yet back when they were together. The only pictures of them were those they, themselves, had taken. Or so they had believed.

Right before the election, photos of the pair, in various romantic scenarios, had broken around the world. It was the kind of “October surprise” every political candidate feared.

Mitchell’s campaign had been blindsided. His top people thought for sure it would sink them, but the public had responded with a different reaction. They loved the photos and couldn’t get enough.

The college version of Jim Mitchell showed him to be every bit the heartthrob he was now—tall and devilishly handsome, as well as something the public hadn’t seen before, surprisingly bohemian.

No matter what you thought of him as a political candidate, there was no denying that his younger self could rock jeans, T-shirts, and a pair of work boots better than any sports or Hollywood superstar.

Nevertheless, hostile members of the opposing press tried to denigrate him and use the “Affaire Russe,” as it became known, against him.

They had a field day with all sorts of tabloid-style headlines like “Sleepless in St. Petersburg,” “The Bridges of Moscow County,” and the lamest and most obvious of all, “From Russia with Love.”

When interest in the love story only grew, they switched to attacking the lovers personally. They called him “Comrade Crush” and Anna the “Kremlin Cutie.”

Eventually, as the attempts to tar him with scandal failed and Mitchell kept surging in the polls, bitter partisan journalists resorted to calling him the “Populist Pinup.” It was all they had. He was running away with the election and everyone knew he was going to win.

The revelation of his relationship with Anna, however, had struck a nerve with him.

Mitchell was an unknown in his college days.

There was only one explanation for him and Anna to have been followed by someone with a long lens camera back then.

It had to have been an intelligence organization. But whose?

It seemed pretty obvious to Mitchell and his team.

The Russians had nothing to gain by embarrassing him.

He was a post–Cold War candidate who hadn’t grown up with duck-and-cover drills and the specter of Soviet communism.

By his own admission, he was the forward-looking candidate, eager to turn the page and move on from the “outdated” and “unnecessary” antagonisms of the previous century.

That left only one intelligence organization that would have wanted to use his time in Russia and his relationship with Anna and her family to hurt his candidacy—the CIA. And where the Central Intelligence Agency was involved, the FBI was always close at hand.

As a candidate who had stirred up so much popular passion and support by promising to reform government and make it answerable to the people, Mitchell was well aware of the threat he posed to the entrenched bureaucracies of Washington, D.C.

And while he couldn’t do away with America’s preeminent intelligence agencies, he could place people in charge who would be answerable and completely loyal to him, which was what he had done.

He wanted the CIA and the FBI on a short leash, especially when it came to anything having to do with Russia.

He didn’t trust either organization further than he could throw them.

That was why Agents Carolan and Fields had been given a new assignment and were now setting up shop in the basement of the FBI.

“Okay,” said Fields, taking the lid off her own coffee and leaning back in her chair. “So this was Gallo’s idea. My next two questions should be pretty obvious. What’s our assignment and why are we hiding it from the White House?”

“Remember when you called me last night and we were wondering who might be behind the attack on the protest outside the Vice President’s Residence?”

The younger agent nodded and took a sip of her coffee.

Picking up the topmost folder on his desk, he slid it over to her. “We may have an answer.”

Fields opened it and began reading the contents. When her eyes widened, Carolan knew she had gotten to the bombshell.

“This came from our Russian intelligence officer?” she asked. “The motherfucker who shot me when we tried to take him in? Josef Vissarionvich. Aka Joe Nistal?”

“The one and only.”

“The FBI has had him for seven months. How did this not surface until now?”

“Because that’s what the Russians do. They give you some decent stuff up front to establish their bona fides. You get some so-so stuff in the middle. And then the really good intel comes at the end. That’s what they use to hammer out the best possible deal.”

“Has any of it been verified?”

Carolan shook his head. “Not yet. That’s what you and I have been assigned to do.”

“I understand why you’re sick to your stomach. This is going to be radioactive.”

“Now you know why we’re hiding it from the White House.”

“Is that even legal?”

“For the moment,” Carolan replied. “But we’re in a pretty gray area.”

“I didn’t join the FBI for the gray areas,” said Fields.

“Me neither, but here we are.”

“Why us?”

Carolan took a sip of his coffee before responding. “Gallo says that we hit such a home run collaring Nistal, he couldn’t think of anybody better to give it to.”

“Bullshit. I can think of lots of people.”

Carolan shrugged. “And yet, like I said, here we are.”

They sat in silence for several moments until, finally, Fields asked, “So where do you want to start?”

“Seeing as how it’s day one of a new assignment, let’s keep it easy,” he said. “We’re going to get our hazmat suits on and jump right into the blast zone.”