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Geraldine Dempsey—she introduced herself by name and not by title, which was interesting—had a thick twang. Texan, Paul decided.

“Scared? You could say that.” He wondered why she was here, what she wanted from him. “I assume you’re FBI, right?” he said. “What’s your title?”

“I’m not FBI,” she said. “CIA, actually.”

“But . . .”

“You could call me a Russia expert, I suppose, though maybe the ‘expert’ part is in doubt these days. I mean, is anyone an expert on Russia? Who knows what’s really going on over there?”

Paul nodded. He still wondered why she was here. She seemed to have juice. Maybe she was the emergency exit he needed.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “This is an FBI office, right?”

“We do cooperate from time to time, you know. Anyway, first I want to thank you so much for your contribution. You are a cooperating witness, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been providing information to the Bureau?”

“Several months.”

“Wonderful. Well, as you might imagine, I’m very much interested in Arkady Galkin. And the fact that one of your colleagues at Galkin’s firm is dead under suspicious circumstances.”

“Two.”

She arched an eyebrow.

“Jake Larsen died of, presumably, an overdose. And Chad Forrester was killed this morning.”

She shook her head as if this were news to her. “So I’d like to get to the bottom of this.” Her accent was West Texan, Paul deduced. He had a friend from El Paso who sounded just like her. “We think the killers are from one of the Russian intelligence services, probably GRU.”

“Working together with Galkin?”

She nodded. “Let’s sit down.” She gestured toward the conference table, motioned for Paul to sit at its head, and she sat on his right side. “Tell me everything you know about Arkady Galkin, from the beginning. From the first time you met him. Actually, why don’t you start with how you first met his daughter.”

“Why?” Paul said. “What’s the point? I’ve already told Special Agent Addison everything I know. Don’t you guys talk to each other?”

“If you’ll indulge me. I’m told you’re a first-class noticer, and I want to hear everything from your own mouth, including all the nuances. So much gets lost in interoffice memos.”

He took her through how he’d met Tatyana, at the charity function, how they started going out, how he’d had no idea who she really was, no idea that she was an oligarch’s daughter. The ridiculously over-the-top anniversary party at Galkin’s town house. How he and Galkin had bonded right away. How Galkin had lured him with a huge salary and bonuses. His growing suspicions that Galkin’s firm was engaged in insider trading, how Galkin clearly had sources inside the U.S. government. And how he was probably working for Moscow.

She nodded. “Whom did you tell your suspicions to?”

“Special Agent Addison.”

“I mean, apart from him.”

“Nobody.”

“Not even your friend Rick Jacobson?”

He momentarily startled. He’d never mentioned Rick to the FBI. She’d evidently done some background investigation.

“No, not Rick.”

“You drove to the offsite storage facility where Galkin’s firm keeps old records,” she prompted. “Is that where you found that flash drive that was labeled ‘Phantom’?”

He nodded.

“How did you know it would be there?”

“I didn’t,” Paul confessed. “It was just a lucky guess.”

“No grass grows under your feet. What did you do with it?”

“Eventually, I gave it to Special Agent Addison.”

“And did you keep a copy?”

Paul hesitated a beat. “Yes, I made a copy.”

“Can I ask you why?”

“Why I made a copy?” He thought for a moment. Why had he? “In case anything happened to it,” he said, which he knew wasn’t an adequate explanation.

“You hid a copy in your—in your wife’s apartment,” she said.

“I did.”

“Why?”

“It was the best place I could think of to hide it.”

“But they found it anyway.”

“Right.”

“So you don’t have a copy anymore, is that right?”

Paul hesitated, thinking of the copy he’d put up on SoundCloud. “Right,” he said, though he didn’t sound convincing.

An expression of distrust flickered across her face. “Do you know what’s on that drive?”

“No. It’s encrypted. It looks like garbage.”

“And you didn’t try to get it decrypted?”

“How the hell could I do that? That’s way beyond my skill set.”

“Now, tell me about how you found the secret files on your firm’s server.”

Paul told her about the night he hacked into AGF’s network using the IT guy’s credentials.

“Ingenious,” she said. “You’ve got more guts than you can hang on a fence.”

“Not really.”

“What did you learn from those documents?”

“That Galkin’s fortune all came from the Kremlin. That he’s secretly managing the Kremlin’s money.”

Her expression didn’t waver. Her features showed no surprise. “Did you keep a copy of those files?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. There wasn’t time.”

A long pause. “And did you tell your wife about what you found?”

“Tatyana? No way.”

“Or your friend Rick?”

“No.”

“Or any other friends?”

“No.”

“What did you learn on Galkin’s yacht?”

“I got the passenger list. The manifest. I gave that to Addison.”

“And I assume you made a copy of that, too.”

Paul didn’t answer her implied question. “Before we go any farther, let me ask you: does the CIA have a witness protection program?”

“Look, I like you,” Dempsey said. “So I’m not going to bullshit you. The Agency is one giant bureaucracy. It’s the worst bureaucracy in the entire U.S. government except for maybe the U.S. military. It’s like the Department of Motor Vehicles on steroids. As they say in the mother country”—and then she said something quickly in Russian that Paul didn’t get. Dempsey translated for him: “Anyone who served in the army doesn’t laugh at the circus.”

“What’s your point?”

“We have a resettlement program for intelligence defectors. But that’s not you. Alas. Why are you asking?”

“Because I think I’m next.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Because I’m a cooperating witness for the FBI.”

“But Galkin can’t possibly know that.”

“He knows I went into the firm’s files, both at the office and in the storage place upstate. He may have found out that I was doing some investigation on him in Moscow. He may—it’s possible, and good God, I hope not—they may have found the tracker in his suitcase and know it was me. They want me to come in, probably for questioning. And then I’m probably going to get hit by a car. Or die by poisoning.”

“Well, Paul, we can protect you,” Dempsey said. “As long as you remain a cooperating witness.”

He felt a wriggle of some reptilian fear. “What does that mean?”

“I think you have copies of the manifest from Galkin’s yacht on your phone. I’d like to see your phone, and I’d like to see you delete those photos. From the phone and from the cloud.”

Paul just looked at her, didn’t say anything.

“Same for any copies you have of files on Galkin. Those must be deleted as well.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid this is a matter of national security. It’s a matter of compartmentation. We can’t have those files floating around the internet, unsecured.”

“They’re quite safe.”

“I’m sure you think so,” she said with a smile, her eyebrows tented again, the way you’d speak to someone who was mentally deficient. “But they’re not, and you need to hand them over or delete them right away.”

Paul hesitated a long time while he thought. Then he said, “I’m willing to do that if you can guarantee me Witness Protection, WITSEC. Call it a deal.”

She stared at him for a long moment.

Meanwhile, he examined the wooden tabletop, scratched and smudged. He examined the gray carpet, stained and grimy. There were fingerprints and smudges, too, on the glass walls.

He rewound Geraldine Dempsey’s line of questioning. She hadn’t seemed surprised by his conclusion that Galkin was underwritten by the Kremlin. In fact, nothing he told her had seemed to surprise her. And how did she know Rick Jacobson’s name? Also, she was obsessed with whether he’d made and kept copies of the Phantom flash drive and the other files and whether he’d told anyone about them.

Over the last week, he had thought quite a bit about how to disappear himself, but he kept getting stuck on one thing: if he changed his name and vanished, he would be leaving Tatyana behind. She loved him, Paul believed, as much as she could, but her primary loyalty was to her family. She wouldn’t leave with him.

But shouldn’t he make sure?

Should he ask her outright? The problem was, if he asked her to go away with him, she would immediately tell her father. Of that he was certain. He’d have to take off as soon as she told him no.

Geraldine Dempsey was looking at him, her mouth a straight line, unreadable. Then she smacked the table gently and stood up.

“I’ll see what we can do,” she said at last.