Three Plus One - Scott Lomac

Vienna, November 1989. Tomasz Kowalski has twenty minutes to live, and spends nine of them feeding pigeons that are not there. When the alley closes behind him he strikes a match, and seventeen names vanish before the first shot. The watcher across the street will report two men, both clean, walking east - and be wrong in every particular that matters.

The next morning Warsaw does what no Eastern service has ever done: through a channel that cannot be acknowledged, it asks Langley to find the traitor inside its own building.

The job goes to three women who have never met. Elle Galbraith, an analyst who found the leak before anyone told her it existed. Sophia Padgett, who knows every gap in a building’s security because she has walked through most of them. Dr. Tara Taylor, a psychiatrist who reads institutions the way she reads patients: by what they leave unsaid. In Vienna, Austrian officer Anja Brandt keeps asking her question after the file is closed. A Warsaw officer who wastes nothing counts them in pencil: Trzy + 1.

As the Wall comes down and the old arithmetic fails, they will learn what their own side was willing to spend - and why the killers’ teachers believed the world could never count past one.