Chapter 2: Dead Drop

Katrin spent the first two days verifying that she was not, in fact, the mole, which was a more complex exercise than it sounded. She reviewed her own communications, travel records, and financial transactions with the ruthless objectivity she applied to every investigation, searching for patterns that might indicate compromise she was unaware of. Sophisticated intelligence services could sometimes turn an agent without their knowledge, using techniques that ranged from manipulated information feeds to chemical influence. She found nothing. Her record was clean, which meant either she was innocent or she had been compromised so thoroughly that the evidence was invisible to her own analysis. Both possibilities were troubling. She turned her attention to the other six names. Each one was a senior officer with access to the leaked material and the operational knowledge to pass it without detection. She knew five of them personally. She had trained with two. One had saved her life in Istanbul. Investigating people she trusted felt like performing surgery on her own body. She began with the most recent leak: the exposure of a network in Prague that had resulted in the arrest of three local assets. The intelligence had been distributed to the seven-person list forty-eight hours before the arrests. Katrin mapped each recipient's movements during that window and found that six of them had maintained their normal patterns. The seventh, a signals analyst named David Radner, had deviated from his routine by visiting an antique shop in the Eighth District that Katrin recognized from an old surveillance file as a known dead drop location for a foreign service. She visited the shop the following day. It sold clocks. Hundreds of them lined the walls, ticking in an overlapping cacophony that would mask any conversation from audio surveillance. The shopkeeper was an elderly woman who greeted Katrin with professional neutrality and showed no reaction when she asked to see the collection in the back room. 'That section is by appointment only,' the woman said. Katrin left and waited.