CHAPTER 24
Harvey Rudd scraped the last of the marinara sauce out of the tiny bowl before shoving the final mozzarella stick into his mouth. They never gave you enough sauce for the whole basket. He licked his fingers clean, a Chattanooga barbecue-joint habit that Jolene loathed. She shook her head and looked away as he went from finger to finger. Long gone were the days when she would complain.
They’d gotten along like that for as long as he could remember. From the beginning, actually, which was why they’d eventually been put together as a team. He remembered the first time he’d laid eyes on her like it was yesterday. They had been flirting for a few months between classes during their first semester at Moscow State University, not quite dating, when Soviet Main Intelligence Directorate （GRU） agents abruptly plucked them out of school and sent them to an intensive American studies institute on the outskirts of Novosibirsk. GRU authorities told them the academy was a temporary extension of their studies at the School of International Relations, but both of them knew better.
The institute, which reminded him of a Komsomol academy he had attended a few summers ago for a young communist leadership camp, was run more like a military program than an academic extension. They lived in well-worn but solid barracks buildings, and participated in rigorous physical training twice a day, once in the early morning and again after classes ended in the late afternoon. The instructors had been conditioning them for something big. That much was obvious.
Despite the harsh, scarcely academic conditions, he had never considered leaving. On most weekends, the hundred or so students were bused in groups to downtown Novosibirsk for a few hours of leisure time, where they spent most of their university stipend on restaurant meals they could never afford back in Moscow. He’d spent most of that time with Ludmilla, a.k.a. Jolene, building the relationship that would lead to their marriage and get them posted together in the United States. She had gotten him through the darkest of days with little more than a smile, and the prospect of her companionship on the weekend.
Five years and three military bases later, the GRU smuggled Vadim Krukov and Ludmilla Alyev into the US with perfectly forged identities, a generously padded bank account that was refilled regularly, and a paid-off house in the Chattanooga suburbs, where they’d posed as Harvey and Jolene Rudd for nearly thirty years.
His phone chirped and buzzed at the same time. A quick look at the screen told him Marnie Young was on the move. Crap.
“Looks like we’ll be needin’ a to-go bag,” he said, passing the phone to Jolene.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Jolene, waving down one of the servers. “You get the car.”
“See you out front,” he said, getting up.
On his way out, he stopped at the host stand and notified the young man managing the wait list that they had to leave immediately due to a family emergency—just to double up on Jolene’s efforts to get them out of here quickly. He jogged through the parking lot to their SUV and put his phone in the holder attached to the dashboard. After backing out of the space, he took the satellite phone out of the glove box and gave Rick Gentry a call.
“I see it,” said Gentry. “On my way out of the room. She just turned north on Broad Street, so maybe she’s headed back to the coffee shop?”
“CONTROL indicated little to no evening activity since she moved back to DC,” said Rudd, headed for the restaurant’s entrance.
“She’s thirty-seven, single, and has been living with her parents for a few weeks,” said Gentry. “This night could go in any of a dozen directions.”
“I hope they go in Devin Gray’s direction,” said Rudd.
“It doesn’t sound like it if he hasn’t answered her texts,” said Gentry.
“He went dark on that phone,” said Rudd.
“Same result,” said Gentry. “Who knows. Maybe we’ll get lucky. I’m in the lobby. I’ll be on the road shortly.”
Jolene barreled through the door several seconds after he’d stopped and put on the SUV’s hazard lights. She carried a take-out bag and two large to-go drink cups as she hustled to the car. He leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door for her.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to see those bags!” he said. “And you, of course.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, handing him the cups. “I didn’t want to have to fight you over the last granola bar in my purse.”
He set the cups in the cup holders, and she dropped her purse into the footwell, keeping the take-out bag balanced on her knees while she buckled her seat belt.