The Man in Vermont

Anatoly answers on the third ring, as if the receiver had been resting under his palm for nine years. Margarita. The Russian softness of her old name lands like a slap. You say the phrase. The silence that follows is longer than a continent.

"That is not us," he says finally. "That cannot be us. Our service is bones in the ground, Margarita. Someone is wearing our dead like a coat."

He tells you to listen carefully. The cadence of the activation — the dead drop location, the noon window — is textbook First Directorate. But the channel is wrong. The crossword was an American puppet's string, pulled by a hand that learned the trick from a ghost. Someone bought the codes. And whoever they are, they need her to do something the real service would never have asked.