Page 33 of Dead Fall

If they intended to starve her to death, that was fine by her. She just wished they would hurry it up.

Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. They would keep her alive for as long as she served their purposes. Once that had happened, or once they had found a fresh replacement for her, then they would kill her. As far as Anna was concerned, the end couldn’t come soon enough.

In the moments when she was left alone and she was not plagued by nightmares or despair, she dreamed of revenge.

She envisioned locking the doors of the building, setting it on fire, and burning the men alive. It was the worst torture she could think of—for the monsters to know that they were going to die and for their deaths to be racked with as much fear and pain as possible.

Once or twice, she wondered what she might do with the art—how she would go about burning the building to the ground but save the artifacts from destruction. In a way, they were her fellow hostages. If she could escape, didn’t she have an obligation to them as well?

She was losing her mind. Seeing the stolen pieces of art as anything other than inanimate objects without agency was the rambling of a madwoman. Yet she hadn’t been able to shake the thought. And the more she tried to expunge it from her mind, the more firmly it took root.

It began to give her something more powerful than hope; it began to give her purpose. Purpose was a reason to stay alive. She didn’t know that she wanted one.

In fact, she was quite certain that what she truly wanted was for her life to be over. But the more she struggled to push the sense of purpose from her mind, the more insistent it became. It took on a life and a voice all its own and began speaking to her, pushing her, arguing with her.

In her moments of clarity, which were happening less and less often, she grasped that she was having a complete and utter psychotic break, but she had neither the energy nor the will to fight to hold on to what was left of her mind.

Maybe to escape the trauma of her captivity, it was better to go crazy. If she couldn’t escape in body, then why not escape inward, into the boundless expanse of her own mind? There, she could be safe. There, no one could touch her. No one could hurt her. Not anymore.

And so, with her eyes swollen shut, she severed her mental tether to reality and allowed herself to let go.

CHAPTER 10

WASHINGTON, D.C.

The FBI was an around-the-clock operation. Its personnel worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

That said, Carolan preferred coming in off hours. He wasn’t a big people person and office politics had always bothered him.

The Bureau’s Counterintelligence Division was relatively quiet on the weekends, which was just the way he liked it.

Even better, the Russia Operations section was all but empty. That meant no ringing phones. No useless meetings that could have been handled via email. Nobody popping their head in the door wanting to chat. No distractions.

He needed the silence because he had to get his head wrapped around this case and shake something loose.

The trip to the Commodore Yacht Club hadn’t produced a ton of fruit. The manager, the bartender, and a waitress all confirmed that Burman had been there the previous evening. He had been the guest of one of the members—a former Senator turned lobbyist named Greg Wilson.

Thursdays in D.C. were popular nights to go out and there had also been a junior members’ social function going on. The club had been packed.

Burman and Wilson had had drinks and dinner together. But when Wilson left, Burman stayed behind and had a few more drinks in the bar, chatting up several of the women.

Once he was ready to call it a night, he was way too drunk to drive. He decided instead to call an Uber and left his car behind. The Uber, Carolan learned after reaching out to a contact at the company and arranging to meet the driver, had dropped him at some late-night gyro place a few blocks from his apartment building. He made small talk during the drive, was pretty wasted, and gave the driver a big tip.

The owners of the gyro shop confirmed that he had been there, alone, and had ordered food to go, which he started eating before he had even stepped outside. They didn’t remember anyone hanging around outside, nor did they notice anyone following him.

The CCTV footage the FBI had sourced from buildings in the area showed him walking by himself, eating his food. They had him on camera all the way up to the moment he had entered his apartment building. There was nothing weird. Nothing nefarious.

Carolan was starting to worry that maybe he was trying to hammer a square Russian peg into a totally unrelated round hole.

Burman, according to multiple sources, had unquestionably been drunk. Not only had witnesses served him and seen him consuming alcohol, but he’d also had trouble with his balance and had been slurring his words. Who’s to say he hadn’t gone out onto the terrace of his own accord and, while there, done something stupid like lean too far back against the railing while taking a selfie? Drunk people did dumb stuff every day and every night. Trying to guess what someone in an impaired state was thinking was an exercise in futility.

But what if that was exactly what the Russians had wanted everyone to think? That Burman—whom lots of people had seen drinking—had been drunk and must have either accidentally fallen, or been suffering from suicidal ideation, which, in his stupor, had resulted in his deciding to take his own life by jumping off his rooftop terrace.

Barring some overzealous investigator, it would be an open-and-shut case. While Carolan’s logical brain might have been warning him that he was chasing smoke, his gut was telling him that there was fire. And if there was one thing he had learned over the course of his career, it was that his gut was always right—even if his brain took longer to fit the pieces together and catch up.

Leading with your gut wasn’t always the best way to handle things. Emotions cloud your judgment. Carolan had seen plenty of good agents step in it by not thinking things through. From time to time, even he was guilty of it. The trip to the yacht club was a perfect example.

He didn’t need to take Fields inside with him. Experience had taught him that hanging back and waiting for some members to show up for lunch was the wise play. Hoity-toity places like the Commodore didn’t like it when law enforcement of any kind came sniffing around, especially when there were guests on the premises. They preferred to keep that stuff out of the customers’ view.

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