But how to approach them? This was the conundrum. She couldn’t stop thinking about it, turning it over and over in her mind as she went through the motions of a regular day. New employees were told during orientation about agents who’d turned traitor. Their cases were dissected in painful detail, the traitors’ mistakes paraded before their eyes. The upshot was that new hires were made to believe it was impossible to contact a foreign service. Usually, would-be traitors approached the enemy’s representatives closest to hand: foreign embassies. But Langley and the FBI had the embassies and consulates in D.C. covered, or so CIA officers were told. How they did this was never explained, but Theresa imagined they held stakeouts near the entrances. You could be fired for visiting a foreign embassy without express permission. Theresa was understandably nervous. She didn’t want to be found out, caught, and arrested, before she’d even begun.
She read up on the ways that spies before her—Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, Ronald Pelton—had made contact. Disappointingly, most happened overseas, where security was weaker and it wasn’t possible for U.S. authorities to watch their people all the time. Luckily for Theresa, it would be easy for her to find out about the Russians working at the embassy: it was there in the office files, the information needed to surveil the adversary. It was all at her fingertips: where Russian embassy employees lived, which schools their children went to, the bars and restaurants they liked to frequent. She was careful not to spend too much time at file cabinets to avoid drawing attention. Nonetheless, her heart raced and her palms sweated the whole time, as if she expected to be discovered. For a security officer to appear at her desk any minute with a curt, “Please come with me, ma’am.” But each time she thought about stepping away and forgetting the whole thing, she was haunted by the thought of Richard in a Russian jail, wasting away. Anything he had suffered was a thousand times worse than what she faced. And she would return to the files.
Before long, her research led her time and again to the same man. Evgeni Constantinov seemed the best candidate; listed as a low-ranking officer in the embassy’s cultural section, there was no doubt he was really an SVR officer using the position as cover. He lived in a good-sized house in Great Falls—no low-ranking Russian diplomat could afford to live there—and the clincher was his proximity to McLean. Surveillance would be a breeze. Being closer to home, there’d be less traffic to deal with. Less time away from Brian.
Having picked her target, she moved on to the next step: learning his route. It meant leaving her son with a sitter in the evenings but a necessary sacrifice, she told herself as she kissed his head and climbed into a rental car she’d left in a church parking lot near her house. After driving an elaborate surveillance detection route through northern Virginia, she headed to the Russian embassy on Wisconsin Avenue. The location had been quite a coup for the Russians, not far from the Naval Observatory where the vice president and his family lived, a lovely part of town. Every night, she parked or circled the block until she saw Constantinov’s car leave the compound, then followed at a discreet distance as he drove home. The more she saw of him, the more she was convinced Constantinov was not just an attaché in the foreign ministry. He was a little too alert and attentive behind the wheel of a splashy SUV. A little too fit, he looked like Russian military. She followed him every night for a week until she was satisfied with his consistency. He left the building at approximately the same time each night, took the same route. Apparently, he didn’t think he was being tailed by the Americans or didn’t care. There would be times when he would work late or be called away on duty, but for her purposes, she felt pretty sure that he would fit the bill.
She found one spot in particular good for an approach: there was a bottleneck on Constantinov’s route, where he had to maneuver his car from MacArthur Boulevard to the Clara Barton Parkway, around Ericsson Road. It was still city there and pedestrians milled on the street corners, waiting at bus stops and popping in and out of shops. She could do a brush pass by his car and it wouldn’t be noticeable, if it turned out the FBI had someone watching him.
Another lucky break was that Constantinov smoked, a habit that was slow to die out among Russians. He often drove with his windows down, plumes of smoke rising above his car as he sat in traffic. He drove a massive SUV, surely an embassy vehicle, and it sat high on the road. She practiced making passes in her garage where no one would see her, walking by and aiming for a high shelf approximately the height of the SUV’s door, until they were perfectly smooth. Undetectable.
Her hands shook as she wrote the note: I am a CIA officer with information that will be of interest to you. Followed by instructions for a rendezvous if they wanted to meet. The chances of follow-through, she knew, were almost nil. They would suspect the whole thing was a trap, albeit a clumsy one. It meant the possibility of multiple attempts passing notes to Constantinov to persuade them. And even if they were intrigued, it might be a long time before they decided to act. They’d need to identify her and then they would follow her and study her, until they were satisfied that she wasn’t setting them up.
She folded the note so it would stay closed if she should somehow miss the window and it fell to the gutter or sidewalk, and kept it hidden in the rental car under a floor mat, but even this tenuous connection back to her made her nervous. It was proof of her perfidy in block lettering on yellow legal paper, tangible evidence of her intent to betray her country.
The country that had betrayed her first.
Every day, she did the same thing. She went home after work and made dinner for Brian, leaving him with the sitter. Then she drove the rental car to a sleepy branch library where she donned a wig and glasses, a different coat and handbag. After that, she went to MacArthur Boulevard, parked the car, and walked to the intersection where Constantinov would be in about an hour, stuck in traffic. She made many dry runs, practiced spotting his car and doing brushes. Calculating how far from the curb she’d need to be to slide the tightly folded note through the open window on the passenger’s side—without being noticed. An entire week passed before she was satisfied that he wasn’t being followed or watched by the FBI.
The second week, however, Constantinov disappeared. She watched the traffic at MacArthur Boulevard but didn’t see his SUV. Whether his absence was due to late nights in the office or a sudden trip out of town, she didn’t know. It was so maddening that, back in the office, she dared to check his file, but there were no updates, no new notes. While it meant she had no idea where he’d gone, the only upside was that he didn’t appear to be on anyone’s radar.
And then the third week, he reappeared, falling back into his normal routine. The amount of relief she felt was enormous, unexpectedly so. It was as though fate was reassuring her that this was meant to be. The plan was back on. She would proceed.
She did her run the first three days that week but chickened out at the last minute each time. She’d get the feeling she was being followed or didn’t like the look of a man lingering on the corner, afraid he might be FBI even though she knew that he wasn’t. Nobody cared about Constantinov, the out-of-date file in the office backed that fact up. She wasn’t being followed. It was jitters, pure and simple. Get a grip on yourself. Either you’re going to do this or you’re not. So, on Thursday, she steeled herself and walked toward Constantinov’s car as it idled in traffic. She veered to the curb. He had no idea what was happening, she could tell by the bored expression on his face, the way he looked through the windshield like a law enforcement officer, at nothing and everything at once. The effortless flick of ash from the end of his cigarette. She slid the folded note into his cab so efficiently that she almost could believe she hadn’t done it, walking away with blood pounding in her ears. No one on the street had noticed, not even the people beside her on the sidewalk. Maybe even Constantinov—either that or he’d had the presence of mind not to react. Either way, he wouldn’t do anything until he’d pulled into the two-car garage at home and leaned over for his briefcase and saw the yellow triangle of paper resting on the seat. A simple note waiting for him like a time bomb.