himself.”
Alex Banich stuck his head inside the lioness’s den at her request. “You rang?”
“Yep. Wait one, okay?” Erin McKenna spoke without looking away from her glowing computer monitor. Her fingers flashed across the keyboard parked in her lap, entering new data or making new demands on an already overtaxed system.
“Sure.” Banich leaned against the doorjamb, folded his arms, and watched her work. He fought off a yawn.
The Commerce Department analyst looked as tired as he felt. Her eyes were shadowed and bloodshot, the product of too many hours spent staring at tiny print and endless columns of figures. Even her long, auburn hair looked mussed. She sometimes wrapped her ponytail around her fingers when she thought no one was looking. He’d even caught her chewing isolated strands while she sat lost in thought, trying hard to piece together a coherent picture from fragments of fact, rumor, and pure guesswork.
The months since Russia declared martial law had flown by in a dizzying, exhausting cycle of busy days and work-filled nights. The CIA’s Moscow Station had been understaffed and overworked even before Marshal Kaminov and his cronies made their move. Now, with personnel restrictions in place on all foreign embassies, and with all freedoms greatly restricted, things were even worse. Neither of them could waste time or energy arguing for the sheer, cussed joy of it.
So, partly out of necessity and partly out of sheer fatigue, they’d negotiated an uneasy truce and a practical division of labor. Banich focused his efforts on the military and political side of the spectrum, while McKenna concentrated on trade and economic developments.
So far at least, she had been more successful. Her contacts inside the Russian Ministries of Trade and Finance were civilians with a reformist streak who weren’t happy under military rule. They fed her a fairly steady stream of raw trade and economic data — some classified, some unclassified, and some just hard to find without help.
Banich wasn’t as fortunate. He was being run ragged just trying to maintain his cover as Nikolai Ushenko without being bankrupted in the process. Backed by army decrees, the government ministries he supplied made constant demands for more food at below-market prices. These new price controls made it impossible for him to bargain for sensitive information. By wiping out his profit margins, they were also siphoning away the resources he needed to buy secrets from a corrupt few still willing to sell them.
Still, he’d had a little luck recently. Like Erin, he’d made several promising contacts on the civilian side of the Russian government. Even inside the Defense Ministry there were officials who despised the army’s heavy-handed attempt to reimpose Stalinist discipline and central planning. And there were persistent rumors that Russia’s President — now only a figurehead under constant GRU surveillance — still hoped he could regain effective control over his country.
Banich dismissed those rumors as simple wishful thinking. Kaminov had relearned an old lesson of Russian politics: the one with the biggest guns governs. He and his fellow marshals were too firmly dug in to be ousted easily or bloodlessly. And with the West hopelessly divided against itself, there wasn’t any realistic prospect of sustained outside pressure for a return to democratic rule.
Erin finished her typing with a final, triumphant stab at the keyboard, punched the print key, and slewed her chair around to face him. “Thanks. I needed to get some ideas down before they wandered off in a gray fog somewhere up here.” She tapped her forehead.
“No problem.” He thought about straightening up and then decided against it. Leaning up against the door felt too good. “Now, what can I do for you? Kidnap the Minister of Trade? Swipe the Czar’s crown jewels? Or did you have something tougher in mind? Like talking Kutner into buying you a bigger computer?”
The corners of her mouth tilted upward in a quick, amused smile. “Not exactly. Though those aren’t bad ideas.”
She turned serious. “What I really need is your brain.”
“Shoot.”
Her tired eyes twinkled at that. “Sorry, I haven’t got a gun.” She ignored his groan. He wasn’t the only one allowed to make bad jokes. “Anyway, I think I’m starting to see a pattern in some of the data we’re collecting, but I need to bounce it off somebody to see if it makes any sense. Especially somebody who was born cynical.”
“Meaning me, I suppose.”
Erin nodded. “Meaning you.”
“Okay.” Banich approved of her instincts. In this business it was all too easy to fall blindly in love with your own theories. That was dangerous, because those theories rested on evidence that was, almost by definition, piecemeal, uncertain, and often contradictory. A good intelligence officer was always willing to give someone else the chance to punch holes in a piece of prized analysis.
He left the doorway and perched on a corner of her desk. “Show me.”
“All right. But it’s a pretty tangled web.” She leaned back in her chair, clearly considering where she should begin. “I’ll give you the punch line first: the French have significantly upped the amount of foreign aid they’re sending to the Russians. Both on a government-to-government level and on a corporate basis. What I don’t know is why they’re doing it.”
Her voice changed subtly as she started retracing her reasoning, always highlighting the differences between what she
There were dozens of pieces to the puzzle she’d put together, some so small and so obscure that he was amazed anyone had ever spotted them, let alone recognized their significance. Some were tiny, cryptic notations on copies of shipping manifests. Others were coded transactions buried inside the State Central Bank’s computer data base. Still other clues came from conversations she’d had with friendly Russian officials and business leaders or from radio and wire intercepts passed on by the NSA.
By itself none of the information she’d collected seemed particularly meaningful. It was like looking too closely at an impressionist painting. Until you stepped back far enough all you saw were tiny dots of different- colored paint. But Erin McKenna had a talent for seeing the patterns behind bits of apparently unconnected data.
Banich sat still, waiting until she was finished. Then he leaned forward. “Let me get this straight. What we’re looking at is a massive flow of new French aid to the government and to state-run industries. Things like no-interest loans and outright grants. Massive shipments of high-tech industrial machinery, spare parts, and computer software. A lot of it has both military
“Right.”
“Any ideas on how much this stuff is worth?”
Erin nodded. “From what I’ve seen so far… at least two billion dollars. That’s just a ballpark guess, but I think it’ll hold up over time.”
Banich whistled softly in astonishment. Two billion dollars’ worth of foreign aid in five or six weeks was an extraordinary effort. The whole U.S. foreign aid budget didn’t amount to more than fifteen or sixteen billion dollars spread out over a whole year. “What the hell are the French up to?”
She shook her head. “That I don’t know. All the money and goods are coming in under the table, so they’re sure as heck not trying to win brownie points with the Russian people.”
“True.” Banich rubbed the sore muscles at the back of his neck. “But nobody throws that kind of funding around on a whim. The Frogs want something from Kaminov and his pals and they want it bad. The only question is, what?”
“Nothing good, I’m sure.”
“Yeah.” He stood up. “I’m going down the hall for a talk with Kutner. If he sees it my way, we’ll send your report off to D.C. by special diplomatic pouch tomorrow morning. I don’t think we should sit on this until we’ve crossed every
Erin nodded wearily and turned back to her keyboard. He knew she’d be working all night and regretted the need for it. Sleep was tough to come by at Moscow Station.
Banich paused by her open door. “Oh, McKenna?”
