Once at the top, he paused before entering to cast a suspicious glance to the two homeless men who flanked the doors. Paranoia was a survival skill in Jonathan’s world, and he wondered why they would choose to hunker down outside on a night like this when they could be inside instead. Or even camped on a steam grate.
For that matter, why didn’t the chronically homeless spend their summers hiking to Florida where it was perpetually warm, and they wouldn’t have to worry about freezing at all? He’d never walked in their shoes, so he wasn’t passing judgment, exactly, but he had to wonder.
The sanctuary looked even more enormous than usual in the dim nighttime lighting. Off to the right, the glimmer of candles attracted him to the Our Lady Chapel, where he knew he’d find Irene Rivers waiting, but was surprised to see that Boxers had beaten him here. Just outside the chapel’s entrance, her two-man security detail stood with their backs to their boss, their arms folded across their chests. In their matching suits, Jonathan thought that they resembled living chess pieces.
Only a handful of people in the intelligence community — none of them with the CIA — knew that the Our Lady Chapel was one of the most acoustically dead spots on the planet. Designed to absorb sound without echo and swept multiple times a day for listening devices, the Chapel — designated Bravo Four Three for reasons Jonathan didn’t know — was one of only a handful of spots in the United States, apart from secure government facilities, where anyone could speak in complete candor without the remotest chance of being overheard or recorded.
Jonathan approached from behind Irene and Boxers, who sat next to each other with a chair separating them. Boxers made the chairs look like they were sized for elementary school students.
“Have I missed anything important?” Jonathan asked as he approached.
Irene stood to greet him. What would normally have been a peck on the cheek turned out to be a hearty handshake in front of witnesses. “I wish I could say I was glad to meet you here,” she said.
“Haven’t missed a thing, Boss. She wouldn’t talk without you here.”
Jonathan sat sideways in his seat, with his left leg folded under his right, his left arm slung over the seat back. “This must be big,” Jonathan said.
“It is,” Irene said. “At least, I think it is. I couldn’t mention it before, because of the company in the room. I don’t know who knows what, and under the circumstances, I’m paranoid about what I say to anyone.”
Jonathan waited, knowing that the silence would eventually fill itself.
“The public record on Mrs. Darmond is inaccurate,” she said. “In fact, it’s elaborate fiction that was created with the full cooperation of my predecessor at the Bureau.”
Boxers’ jaw went slack at the news.
“How elaborate a fiction are we talking about?” Jonathan asked.
“The most. All of it.”
“How can that be?”
Irene scowled. “Of all people, how can you ask that question?”
“We were unit operators,” Jonathan said, feeling oddly defensive. “We’re black out of necessity. And we’re not part of the president’s family.”
“If it makes you feel any better, neither was she when it happened.”
“You’re going to get to the story, right?” Boxers said. Mr. Patience.
“I want to start by emphasizing that this might have nothing to do with the current circumstances,” Irene said.
Jonathan cocked his head. “Which I interpret as meaning that it probably has everything to do with it.”
Irene acknowledged the sentiment with a smirk. “The lady we know as Anna Darmond was actually born Yelena Poltanov.” She spelled it. “Her father was a big-time apparatchik during the last years of the Soviet Union. Yuri Poltanov. Along about the time the Poles started making trouble, Yuri read the handwriting on the walls, and found a way to send his daughter to the United States on a student visa.”
“I thought she was Anna Nazarov.”
“That’s what she wants you to think,” Irene said. “In fact, Uncle Sam himself wishes you think that. Thing is, young Yelena had drunk the Kool-Aid big-time. She didn’t want to leave, and in fact thought that the United States was the embodiment of evil. All that stuff they taught her in school about the evils of capitalism really stuck. She got herself wrapped up in a ton of anti-American activities. That’s how my predecessor got wind of her, and that’s how we were able to develop an extensive file on her.”
This wasn’t clicking for Jonathan at all. “So, how come we haven’t heard about any of this? Seems to me that the tabloids would be all over this story.”
Irene shook her head. “Because outside of our files at headquarters, none of this ever happened. This is the part I was getting to. Back then, there were throngs of Soviet expats here in the US, most of them on student visas, and many of them under the same circumstances as Yelena — committed to duty, honor, and the Motherland, yet exiled by their highly placed fathers. They wreaked all kinds of havoc. Some of what they did was just harassment of the local police, but there were some high-profile robberies and a lot of drug trafficking, too. The big-dollar stuff was all about funding anti-American activities.”
“You mean terrorism?” Boxers asked.
“We didn’t call it that back then,” Irene said. “They set some fires and a couple of bombs. They spent a lot of money and resources spinning up racial tension wherever they could find it. It was a bad group of people.”
“And Mrs. Darmond was among them?” Jonathan asked. He was beginning to feel the seed of a headache.
“As far as we can tell, she was an organizer.”
Boxers said, “The First Lady.” Clearly, the pieces weren’t coming together for him, either.
Irene continued, “The bottom line of all this was, Yelena wasn’t very good at being covert. Whereas her partners in crime stayed well below the radar, she actually left hints to friends that she was up to no good. For example, she told one of her suite mates in college to stay away from the Marine recruiting station on a certain day. That afternoon, a bomb blew out the front windows. A handful of people were injured by shrapnel and blast effects, but none seriously. Yelena didn’t tell the girl specifically about the bomb, but that’s a hard kind of coincidence to ignore.”
“So, you arrested Yelena?” Jonathan said.
Irene shook her head. “Just to be clear here, I personally had nothing to do with any of this. But no, we did not arrest her. The US attorney didn’t think we had enough to put her away.” Irene’s smirk returned. “We did, however, have plenty enough to scare her. A counterintelligence agent picked her up and told her that if she didn’t turn on her friends, she would go to prison for the rest of her life.”
“It was a bluff?”
“Absolutely. But as I said, she’d gulped the Kool-Aid by the gallon. At first, she proclaimed to know nothing of what the agent told her, and then she shifted into martyr mode and swore her allegiance to the Motherland.
“Well, as it turned out, at the same time the Bureau was gathering intelligence on the network of expats, our friends in Langley had their sights on Yuri Poltanov in Moscow. The Wall was softening quickly, and apparatchiks were scrambling to reserve spots on the lifeboats for themselves. He turned on the Kremlin. The Bureau liaison to the Puzzle Palace got wind of it, and we were able to work a little magic.
“We told Yelena what her father had done, and that we would turn him over to the KGB if she didn’t cooperate with us. That did the trick. With her testimony, we were able to nail the entire leadership of the expat network.”
“WitSec?” Jonathan asked. Irene would recognize the acronym for the Marshal Service’s Witness Security program.