Until she’d discovered a folded index card in the front pocket of the bomber jacket she had worn to the botanical garden in Saint Petersburg, accompanied by a note.
Fairly sure I won’t be around for a third meeting. Consider this a parting gift. Don’t let them waste it. Donald Wilson. Springdale, AR. The glue that holds the others together. Sergei Kozlov.
Kozlov couldn’t have put the card into her pocket. The two of them had never come within three feet of each other at any moment during that afternoon. He must have directed someone else to do it after she’d left the garden. A real street pro, because neither Helen nor the surveillance team watching her had detected it. Kozlov must have suspected that the GRU was onto him. There was no other way to explain the card and the note.
But had he triggered its delivery after leaving the garden, or had it been his plan to give it to her all along? Had he committed suicide to keep the revealed names a secret from the GRU, or had he been murdered? Questions that would never be answered. Answers that didn’t really matter. The only meaningful question that remained to be asked was, What should she do with the third name?
The obvious answer was to hand it over to her superiors at the agency, but Kozlov had covertly given it to her for a reason—along with a warning. Don’t let them waste it. She’d understood what he had meant, which was why she hadn’t turned over the name immediately upon her return to Langley. The agency had effectively closed the Kozlov file. They’d either deep-six the name with the rest of the file or hand it off to the FBI with a nonurgent request for a background investigation, where it would meet a similar fate.
General Kozlov had given her the third name, knowing his time had run out. He had ultimately decided that passing her the note card had been more important than taking Donald Wilson’s name to the grave. She’d looked into Wilson on her own, ultimately ending up in the same place as Kozlov. Dead by her own hand instead of revealing what she’d discovered: a widespread, multitiered sleeper network—unlike anything the FBI or CIA had ever caught wind of.
His mother had identified seventy additional sleeper couples that fit the same profile as the Kelleys, Holmans, and Wilsons. Materialized out of thin air in the early seventies. Regular jobs. Nothing that would require a background check beyond running a basic police report. More than half of them had made their grand entrance in college. One moment they didn’t exist. The next—they were college freshmen.
Like the Kelleys and Holmans, none of them had appeared to have ever held a position that might pose an espionage threat to the country. Sabotage or assassination was a different story. The traditional assumption had always been that the Soviet Union would activate sleeper agents if the two countries went to war, to create chaos in the United States. But according to Helen’s theory, it had never really been about the parents. It had always been about the children. That was what his mother had figured out, and why she had become so obsessed with unraveling the sleeper network.
Helen’s wall listed three members of the House of Representatives. An assistant secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. A principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. A one-star Air Force general working in the Pentagon. A one-star Navy admiral serving as commander, US Forces, Japan. Several other high-ranking officers spread throughout the four branches. Two FBI special agents in charge. A few other high-ranking FBI agents. State Department personnel, including our Ukrainian ambassador. And at least two suspected CIA officers working at Langley, both of them in counterintelligence.
Karl Berg visibly reeled when they came across those two names. The Soviets had successfully launched an extensive second-generation network of sleepers who could breeze through the most rigorous security clearance investigations. The parents checked out. They checked out.
The only flaw in Helen’s conspiracy theory was that she had absolutely no proof that the identified individuals were indeed Russian sleeper agents.
Devin’s stomach growled, mercifully distracting him from the grim thought. He’d been running on Red Bull all night. There was no point in continuing this without eating. He could barely concentrate at this point. He searched online for a nearby breakfast spot, finding something within fairly easy walking distance. He got up from the desk, the sound of the chair scraping the floor and jolting Berg awake. The retired CIA officer lifted his head off the kitchen table, which they’d dragged into the room last night, and yawned.
He still didn’t know what to think of Berg, but his mother had trusted him implicitly, according to a note he’d found on the first page of Helen’s executive summary file.