Zoya Zakharova had been waiting for fifteen minutes at the front door of the Nordstrom Rack on 12th Street in D.C. when the doors opened at nine a.m. She bought a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, a zip-up jacket, two casual tops, a pair of slip-on flats, and a new pair of running shoes. She headed across the street to a Starbucks to change in their bathroom, stuffing the clothes she had been wearing, her shoes, and the shopping bags all in the trash.
At nine forty-five a.m. she sat at a computer terminal at the Northwest One Neighborhood Library, doing research on the Internet. She jotted down pages of information with paper and a pen she borrowed from a high school kid and, while she did this, she shot her eyes up and around the room every few seconds. She knew CIA had robust facial recognition technology, and she’d not been able to avoid all the cameras on the streets or in the library, but she also knew CIA was not supposed to use their tech inside the United States.
Still, she came from Russia and had worked in their government, so she knew how a government’s intelligence services could be easily and efficiently turned around on its own people. She couldn’t be sure the same was not happening here in the States, so she remained ever vigilant.
She had planned four different escape routes out of the library if the walls started closing in on her, and she was ready to fight if the men who’d attacked the safe house the evening before reappeared.
But no one came to take her away, and she continued with her work.
And by ten thirty she knew where she needed to go and what she needed to do.
She was a woman on a mission, a highly trained asset with a plan.
First things first, though. To accomplish her operation she had to get out of the United States and into Europe. This wasn’t going to be easy, since she had no passport or identification, but she knew a way.
It would take all her abilities of manipulation and deception to pull it off, but she’d been a student and a practitioner of high-level social engineering since she was a child, so she knew she could get it done.
CHAPTER 16
FOUR MONTHS EARLIER
North Korean virologist Dr. Won Jang-Mi stepped out of her office at the European Centre for Disease Prevention, her lunch swinging from a plastic bag in her hand. Stockholm was in the midst of winter and the temperatures were below freezing, but in her heavy down coat and knit cap it wasn’t unbearable. On sunny days like this Won liked to take her lunch alone outside on one of the wooden benches just behind her building.
Her two security officers had returned to North Korea when she moved to Stockholm; there was no rational overt reason for the woman to have men at her shoulder all the time, and they could hardly reveal they were her bodyguards. Since then, she had been alone for nearly two years, except for during her workdays at the center. This sequestration of herself from others was one third due to the tradecraft ingrained in her by the North Korean intelligence apparatus, one third due to her absolute hatred of the West, and one third due to her crippling social anxiety that made personal relationships here, or anywhere, nearly impossible.
The other change made when she’d moved from Shikhany, Russia, to Stockholm twenty months earlier, under orders from North Korean intelligence and with the help of Russian intelligence, was replacing her Korean given name Jang-Mi with the Westernized “Janice.”
Now Janice Won sat down on her bench after wiping it off with a hand towel she kept in her bag for that duty.
She tightened up her coat at the neck and looked at the dirty picnic table.
Won had suffered her entire life with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each evening she laid out every bit of her clothing, her shoes, and all her accessories on a table or sofa or chair in a perfect representation of how she would wear them the next day. She impulsively washed her hands, and washed all utensils and flatware twice before meals and twice more after meals.
Even with her OCD, eating out here was better than eating in the cafeteria with all the Westerners.
Won had grown up with icy winters in North Korea, and more often than not there was no fuel for the tiny coal-fired furnace in