“But then Richard came home very late one evening, his face white. Brian had already gone to bed. Richard pulled out the bottle of Yamskaya, his favorite vodka, and poured us both a drink. They’d just learned the Russians were onto his asset. By sheer luck, she had not been home when the police came for her and managed to go into hiding. She wouldn’t survive long on the street, though, now that she was blown. And Langley had no resources who could help her, no one they were willing to risk.
“Richard wouldn’t let them desert his asset. It fell under Eric. Richard went to him and told him they had to get her out, no matter what. You know as well as I that extractions are complex operations. They take months to plan, not days. And dangerous, too. The whole thing seemed absurdly foolhardy, the gesture of a hard-core romantic—and for a moment I even questioned Richard’s motives, wondered if there was something going on with this asset that I didn’t know about.” She stops, her expression a tangle of regret and unhappiness. So, she’s wondered all this time, too, if Richard had been faithful, whether he had ulterior motives going to Moscow . . . The hurt this woman has been carrying is unimaginable.
“I wanted to ask him, ‘What about us?’ What about putting his family first? I wanted to throw it all in his face, but I couldn’t. It’s not that simple, is it? There’s no equation to tell you how much loyalty you owe to an asset.” She puts a hand over her eyes. Hiding from the pain. “He had to go, he argued. His asset had risked her life on his word. He couldn’t let the Russians catch her. Besides, no intelligence professional ever thinks he’s going to make a mistake. Richard didn’t think for a split second that he wouldn’t be coming home.”
Theresa takes a deep breath. Fighting back tears. “Eric Newman was the one to tell me. He called me into his office . . . I sat on the couch like everything was normal, even though I knew something bad was coming. Even though every nerve in my body was telling me to get out of there. To run.
“The rescue operation had not gone well, he said. It was as though the Russians knew Richard was coming. He had been the one to go in for her. He had insisted on escorting her to the safe house. She was his responsibility, he would take the risk. That was the last anyone saw him.”
Is this good, recalling all this? Lyndsey wonders. Is it cathartic? The woman had just admitted that she hasn’t any friends; she probably hasn’t talked to anyone about it, not in a good, long time.
Theresa continues. “Details came out over the next few months, bit by bit. It was like Chinese water torture. Eric claimed he was given permission to share it with me in fits and starts. The Russians refused to return Richard’s body. Apparently, CIA had scored a serious coup with this asset and made the FSB look bad.
“But then the counterarguments started—you know how that is, how they love to twist and twist and twist a story, to see if there’s some angle they can come up with, something no one’s thought of before. And sure enough, someone got it into his head that the asset had been a plant, an elaborate trap by the FSB to redeem itself in Putin’s eyes, and that Eric and Richard had been duped all along. There wasn’t a shred of evidence to support it, but that didn’t stop it from taking on a life of its own. The whole episode—the asset, Richard’s death—became radioactive on the seventh floor.” All the tension goes out of Theresa all at once. She is wrung out like a washcloth. “I was told to stop pushing the issue and to accept what had happened. There was nothing more I could do.”
With that, the spell is broken. The sounds of the mall courtyard return, yelps and laughter of excited children. Lyndsey blinks, the story Theresa just told her evaporating like perfume on the air. Did Theresa really just share all that with her, here, in a crowded mall? Maybe she can only tell that story outside of Langley. As an act of defiance. Outside the Agency’s domain, beyond their reach.
Brian runs up to them, a flush to his pale face. He has a few breathy words for his mother—“monkey bars for my little monkey” Theresa says as she ruffles his hair affectionately—before turning once again to Lyndsey with wide, curious eyes. Trying to make sense of her, her importance to his mother.
Something has happened just now: Theresa shared her burden with Lyndsey. Lyndsey now knows the complicated tale of loyalty and betrayal that has left a woman alone to care for a fatherless child. She suddenly feels close to Theresa and is sorry that this didn’t happen earlier. Why didn’t they become friends at the start? she wonders. Too dissimilar, probably: Theresa was already married, a young wife, whereas Lyndsey was just out of college and still green. Theresa was also the wife of a branch chief, in an entirely different social world. But circumstances have thrown them together now. Lyndsey realizes with a start, as Theresa gathers her shopping bags, that this is the most intimate conversation she’s had with a woman in the last five years. Overseas stations are notoriously light on female officers. And one tends to let old friends and even family slip away during covert overseas assignments.
Theresa Warner, The Widow, is the closest thing she
