in the face of death.
And he could think. And use his memory to try to catch some anomaly, some inconsistency that would point him in the right direction. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and listened to the rain falling.
But his thoughts were actually not on the case. He was not thinking about Walter Dabney, or Anne Berkshire, or anything along those lines.
Molly and Cassie.
Daughter and wife.
Dead nearly two years now. And as time passed it would be ten years, then twenty, then thirty, then…
He could imagine the passage of time. He could imagine the lessening of grief, of loss. But he could not imagine that lessening happening to him. All he had to do was reach back into his perfect memory and there it would all be, the discovery of the bodies, in their full hellish glory, with not a single impression or observation subtracted from the equation or diminished by the passage of time.
He opened his eyes and there she was.
“I don’t like being followed,” he said crossly.
Harper Brown sat down next to him.
“I’m not too keen on having to follow you.”
“So why do it?”
“Protecting assets, Decker. And DIA considers you a prime one.”
“I work for the FBI.”
“For now you do. But there’s always tomorrow.” Before he could respond she said, “What were you thinking about just now?”
“Nothing.”
She laughed lightly. “As if.”
“Why are you here?”
“I already said.”
“They could have sent a flunky to follow me. I see this as a waste of your time. You have bigger fish to fry.”
She took something out of her coat pocket. It was a piece of laminated paper. “I finished reading the Russian communication.”
“And?”
“And I might have found something.”
She handed him the laminated paper. “This is a translation.”
Decker read through it. “It says someone named Ahha Seryyzamok was presented with an award for services rendered.”
“Espionage services,” added Brown.
“So who is this Ahha Seryyzamok?”
“I think the answer lies in how the name translates to English.”
“How?”
“Ahha is Anna. She’d be called Anna in Russia too. Remember Anna Karenina? But the different alphabet, you know. I didn’t translate the name fully because I wanted to keep you in suspense.”
He glared at her. “I’m in enough suspense as it is.”
“Touché.”
“And Seryyzamok?”
“It means Greylock.”
“Okay, Anna I get, but how does Greylock help?”
“Greylock is a mountain in Massachusetts.”
“Still not getting the connection.”
“It’s the highest mountain…in the Berkshires.”
Decker held up the translated KGB communication. “She kept this. She was obviously proud of it. Along with the floppy disk and the doll, tools of her spycraft. She was clearly proud of what she did. So why give it up? We’ve assumed that she had a change of heart when she started teaching and volunteering. So why keep the stuff that is clearly associated with her past life in espionage?”
Jamison said, “Are you suggesting that she might still have been a spy, right up until she was killed?”
“I’m saying it’s possible, because we haven’t definitively ruled it out. And we haven’t ruled out that Dabney hasn’t been spying all these years either.”
“Do you have any evidence that he has been?” asked Bogart.
Before Decker could answer, Jamison said, “How about the fact that he was able, in a short period of time, to sell secrets for ten million dollars to enemies of this country in order to pay off his son-in-law’s gambling debts? Now, if he was honest and aboveboard, where did he find a buyer for that much money so quickly? One answer is he could have easily if he’d been spying all along and had knowledge of people willing to pay for secrets.”