Possible confirmation of a long-dormant network of saboteurs and killers in the US scared the hell out of CIA leadership. Unfortunately, the results of a more thorough investigation into the Kelleys would take months. Time the CIA didn’t feel they’d had with Kozlov. The agency had dispatched Helen to meet him again, with instructions to demand a more compelling sample of what he hoped to trade for an exceptionally comfortable and secure life in the United States.
Her recall of the meeting was uncanny. She’d apparently sensed something was wrong the moment Kozlov arrived at the Saint Petersburg Botanical Garden. He had appeared agitated and nervous upon arrival, glancing over his shoulder a number of times and snapping at the clerk while he’d purchased a ticket for a guided tour of the garden’s greenhouses. A stark difference from the stoic, unreadable GRU general she’d met a few weeks earlier.
He’d seemed to settle down once the tour started, the two of them keeping their distance and pretending to care about exotic plants for the hour or so it took the agency support team to give their meeting the green light. Deep inside the sprawling, densely wooded grounds south of the greenhouse complex, the two of them had sat for several minutes in the shade of a towering oak tree, on a small wrought iron bench facing a lily pad–covered pond.
He’d given her the name and address of Denise Holman, suggesting they study the similarities between Holman and Kelley. When she’d pressed him to explain the connection, he’d just stared at the pond for an uncomfortably long period of time—ultimately rejecting her demand. Kozlov had said the CIA needed to identify the pattern and draw the right conclusion on their own.
No more than thirty minutes after Kozlov had given her the second name and walked away, he’d been crushed under a trolley bus on Bolshoy Prospekt, less than a quarter mile from the entrance to the gardens. Helen had been scooped off the street moments later by one of the CIA countersurveillance teams watching over her, and driven straight to Pulkovo Airport, where she had been rushed on board a waiting Gulfstream jet. Barely an hour and a half later, a small convoy of armored SUVs had driven her onto the US embassy compound in Stockholm.
Kozlov’s words had haunted Helen. The pattern she’d ultimately deciphered was chilling, but it had taken her a number of years to figure it out.
The agency had kept her at the embassy for close to a week. The Langley team flew in the day of her arrival and dissected the time she had spent with Kozlov. Second by second. Word by word. Memory by memory. By day three, the team’s questioning had started to feel more like an interrogation than a debriefing to her. By the time they had wrapped up, she’d wished the Saint Petersburg fiasco had never happened. From what she’d gathered, so had the rest of the CIA officers involved in the operation. Preliminary investigative reporting on the Holmans hadn’t looked promising.
Denise Holman and her husband had fit the same profile as the Kelleys. Another possible sleeper team—collecting public pensions and living nowhere close to an obvious espionage target. Retired teachers who had spent the better part of the past three decades working, raising kids, and putting them through college, all while carving out a nice life for themselves in a middle-class suburb of Minneapolis. The once-frightening specter of a potentially devastating sleeper network on US soil was starting to look more and more like an unconnected collection of unused, retired agents.
It hadn’t taken long for the skeptics at Langley to start suggesting Kozlov had played the agency. That the GRU general had tried to pass off retired or deactivated sleepers in exchange for a cushy retirement in the United States. Unlike many of his high-ranking GRU colleagues, Kozlov hadn’t leveraged his position within the still-feared and influential intelligence agency to amass a personal fortune during the rush to privatize the Russian economy.
He’d kept plugging along in the role of the loyal general until his retirement, long after the new oligarch class had risen from the dust and stolen the last of the privatized shares from the people. From what the CIA could gather, Kozlov had little to show for his devoted service beyond a modest government pension, a two-bedroom apartment in a drab low-rise beyond the Third Ring Road, and a tiny, run-down dacha on the outskirts of Moscow. They’d speculated that bitterness and jealousy had pushed Kozlov into an inconsequential betrayal of his country.
Helen Gray hadn’t entirely agreed with the agency’s assessment of the retired general’s motivations, but it hadn’t made a difference what she thought. Kozlov had been a dead end, along with the names he had provided. Despite the puzzling Cold War enigma surrounding the Kelleys’ and Holmans’ seemingly unexciting three-decades-long stint in the United States, nobody had wanted to put any more serious time or resources into the matter—including Helen.