Page 18 of Shadow of Doubt

Nevertheless, she felt betrayed, unable to give Holidae Hayes even the slightest benefit of the doubt. It was a personal and professional gulf that would never be bridged. As far as she was concerned, Hayes was dead to her.Completely.

After letting the security team know that they were taking a break, she allowed Grechko to leave the debriefing room and stretch his legs. Her only prohibition was that he wasn’t allowed to leave the apartment—that included not stepping out onto the balcony.

Once he had exited, she spent a few moments jotting notes—avenues of conversation she wanted to pick back up on after their break.

After getting everything down on paper, she closed her notebook and went in search of some coffee.

The apartment had a machine that used pods, but she much preferred the pour-over method and had purchased a glass Chemex system to keep there. For a coffee aficionado, it was well worth it.

“Can I interest you in some tea?” the Russian asked as she joined him in the kitchen. He was standing at the sink filling a kettle.

“No, thank you,” she replied, opening the cabinet where she kept her coffee beans. Taking them down, she popped the top off the burr grinder she had brought from home and filled the hopper.

The Russian shook his head and laughed. “Norwegians and their coffee.”

“Russians and their tea,” Sølvi said with a smile. “Not to mention their vodka.”

“Touché.”

Looking over at the leader of the security team—a tall, muscular man in his mid-fifties seated in the living room—she asked, “Coffee, Martin?”

“Yes, please,” the man replied.

“You’re sure you don’t want tea?” Grechko interjected, attempting a little good-natured competition. “I can even do it Moroccan-style for you.”

All business, Martin stated, “I’m only interested in Norwegian-style. Coffee, black.”

The Russian turned his attention back to Sølvi. “You people don’t produce a single bean, yet you’re the world’s second-largest consumer per capita. Amazing.”

She knew what he was up to. He was being a chameleon.

Away from the debriefing room and its video cameras and microphones, Grechko had shifted back into “charm” mode. He was trying to build rapport with her, to get her to trust him. It was what all good intelligence officers did.

Except in this case, he wasn’t the debriefer,shewas. And she had no intention of being drawn into any of his games.

That said, she could understand how he had risen so high through the ranks of Russian intelligence.

He was a distinguished-looking man in his early sixties with an above-average intellect. He carried himself with poise and a heap of self-confidence. But beneath that confidence, behind the charm that he turned on and off like a light switch, he was tired, world-weary. He was a man who had seen enough—particularly the unspeakable things that men could do to other men.

He had done many of those unspeakable things himself—all in service of his nation. A nation, if he was to be believed, that he had lost faith in and no longer wanted any part of.

With only the clothes on his back, he had driven across the Norwegian border at Storskog—one of the few European crossings still open to Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. It was a trip that citizens ofMurmansk Oblast made every day. The prices in Norway, not to mention the quality of the goods, were far superior. It wasn’t until the next day that anyone realized he had fled. By then Sølvi had already whisked him the nearly two thousand kilometers south to Oslo.

He was now a man without a country, completely dependent on the Kingdom of Norway for his survival.

For that reason alone, Sølvi was eager to dispense with the “cooperative” defector, “reluctant” defector nonsense and get to the bottom of what he had to offer.

“That’s a shame,” Grechko said, staring into an empty tea tin. “You’re all out of black tea.”

Dumping the coarsely ground coffee into the moistened filter of her Chemex, she told him, “There’s more. Check the pantry.”

He set the tin down and walked around the corner of the gourmet kitchen. The large butler’s pantry was lined with well-stocked shelves containing everything from breakfast cereal to barbecue supplies for the currently off-limits outdoor grill. Through a connecting door, there was a laundry room, which could also be accessed from an additional door off the main hall.

The Russian searched for a few moments, before shouting, “I can’t find any.”

Sølvi rolled her eyes, stopped what she was doing, and went to help him.

As she did, Martin rose from his chair in the living room. “Do you hear that?” he asked.

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