“Sounds exciting,” she said.
“A real barn burner,” said Rudd. “Go to bed. We’ll get the details in the morning and figure out what that means for us in terms of splitting everyone up.”
“Did they say how many folks we’d be watching?”
“No. But they did say no more mobile surveillance of this guy, so it sounds like we’ll still keep someone here to watch over the apartment,” he said. “Let’s hope it’s no more than four, or you and I will have to go our separate ways for a while.”
“This is turning into a real turkey of a job,” she said.
“If by turkey you mean low key and low risk, I’m not complaining,” said Rudd. “I don’t need to go all Mission: Impossible on my last job to feel fulfilled. Sitting in a car and staring through a pair of binoculars sounds like a perfect send-off.”
“I guess,” she said, clearly disappointed.
“Keep your chin up,” said Rudd. “They didn’t take popping him off the table.”
“Well. There’s that. See you in a few hours.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, too,” she said.
Rudd had meant what he’d said about not complaining. Something gave him the sense that this whole mission could escalate at the drop of a hat. Like the situation with Helen Gray. Dave Bender probably never knew what hit him. She’d lit him up before any of them could react.
Devin Gray didn’t strike him as the instantly lethal type, but as the old saying goes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—and he’d like to stay as far away from that family tree as possible this close to retirement.
CHAPTER 15
Devin massaged his chin, his fingers pushing through the thick stubble. Morning had finally arrived, the first vestiges of light appearing through the gaps in the living room curtains visible from his seat at the desk. They’d been up all night studying “the wall,” both of them feeling like they had barely scratched the surface. Helen’s binders were extensive, representing hundreds of hours of reading and study. Working continuously from the moment they stepped up to the wall until now, they’d only pulled about a tenth of the folders from “the library,” mostly skimming each folder’s contents for the context necessary to track his mother’s logic chain.
Devin had followed her story from start to finish, admittedly skimming the files instead of scrutinizing them, and it all made perfect sense.
Based on the service background file she’d left behind, she had worked as a specialized skills officer, serving in an on-demand capacity as an NOC （nonofficial cover） throughout Europe, Russia, and Russia’s former satellite nations. She spoke fluent Russian and German, and had earned a master’s degree in international relations at Boston University. The CIA apparently hadn’t wanted to potentially burn her identity by formally sending her abroad under official cover at an embassy. She’d been productive over the years as an NOC, often traveling behind the Iron Curtain to support intelligence operations that required an outside touch.
Helen Gray’s skill and success in this specialized role put her in Saint Petersburg during the spring of 2003. A fateful assignment that would end two decades later with the kidnapping and murder of Donald Wilson, the point-blank killing of an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, and her own suicide.
Wilson’s name had been the third name provided to her by Sergei Kozlov, the retired GRU general she had been sent to meet in Saint Petersburg, during the spring of 2003. Brian Kelley had been the first. A “puzzling hors d’oeuvre” meant to whet the CIA’s appetite—his mom had a way with words. The FBI hadn’t been able to find a trace of him or his wife, Kathleen, in the United States prior to 1974.
The Kelleys had materialized in northwest Indiana during the spring of that year, when Brian took a job at one of the sprawling steel mills in the region—a job he held until his retirement in the late nineties. Kathleen had split her time between substitute teaching and staying home with their two children.
If the Kelleys were sleeper agents, as Sergei Kozlov had implied, they hadn’t done any obvious damage to United States national security from their blue-collar enclave in northwest Indiana. From what the FBI could initially determine, the family rarely traveled outside the state. The Kelleys appeared to have spent most of their leisure time and money on a no-frills pontoon boat they’d kept at a nearby marina on Lake Michigan.
Not exactly a social circle that implied a productive espionage career for the couple. That said, intelligence gathered from defectors during the Cold War heydays strongly suggested that some Soviet sleepers served purposes beyond espionage. Targeted sabotage and discreet assassination topping their list of potential assignments. Even more troubling, these “deep sleepers” typically remained completely inactive until called on to execute their grim tasks.