by Owen Chance
It was strange to be without his phone, disconnected from his job, even for a few hours. Always duty-bound, Thom had emailed Ambassador Anderson last night to let him know his phone was drying out, but that’d he check his email when he could. Anderson had responded almost immediately, telling Thom that Vice President Adams had stopped by his office, but that they could talk about it when Thom got back that weekend. He ordered Thom to enjoy his time with Jason and to focus on being home, not asking, Thom was thankful, what had happened to his phone. Thom replied, thanking his boss, his dear friend, for his kindness, and leaving the story about his trip home so far for when he returned to Moscow. When he pulled the Jeep into the lot beside the crematory, he parked and sighed, not turning to his friend or taking off his sunglasses quite yet. “This is strange, isn’t it?”
“What?” Trey asked, “Picking up the ashes of your estranged father while you’re home for a couple of days from a mysterious assignment in Moscow? Not strange at all.” This made Thom laugh. Of course Trey hadn’t believed the story about a new network install in the embassy. They’d never send such a high-level cyber agent for that kind of job. “Let’s go pick up Dad,” Thom said before he lost the nerve and gave in to his urge to drive straight to the airport and never deal with any of this, never look back on Amarillo again.
Thom and Trey entered the lobby of Potter County Crematory Services, LLC, and were promptly led to a smaller room set aside for folks picking up the burnt bodies of their loved ones. This room was clearly decorated by a woman with a penchant for sheep and the Psalms and a credit card to Hobby Lobby. The edges of the room were lined with fake ficus trees uplit by white can lights plugged into a series of power strips. One wall was covered by a mural of a lush Middle Eastern canyon where a white shepherd perched among his flock. Thom and Trey turned in a circle to read the hand-painted border lining the top of every wall. “The Lord is my Shepherd” over and over and over.
As they fought the urge to laugh, Thom and Trey turned their attention to the circular table at the center of the room, where a black plastic box held the ashes of Thom’s father. This was the first time Thom and his father had seen each other in nearly three years. Thom thought, too bad his father wasn’t really here to enjoy their reunion.
3.
Vice President Grant Adams was driven from the American Embassy to the beautiful new hospital on the bank of Moskva just north of the Church of St. John the Warrior, where’d he’d been the previous afternoon. A cathedral to the new Russia—a Russia of innovation and progress made of steel and glass punctuated by bright solar panels—the hospital glittered in the sun and had drawn quite a crowd for its grand opening. Adams Secret Service agents were so accustomed to the streets of Moscow at this point that they knew the best routes to every major point in the city. Within 15 minutes, they were passing through a series of gates and the gathered crowds to the underground garage below the hospital’s emergency ward.
Foreign Minister Dimitri Plankov was there to greet the vice president’s small motorcade upon arrival.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Vice President!” Plankov said as Adams’ limousine door was opened to where he stood on the sidewalk. “Before we go upstairs, may I have a word?” Adams couldn’t refuse. In a throwback to Cold War espionage tactics, Adams had succumb to a plot pulled straight from a K.G.B. textbook. The nanny with whom Adams had carried on an affair for his first year in the vice presidency was a Russian mole. An affair for a vice president with a conservative base was bad enough, especially an affair with his children’s nanny. But the Russians held a deeper secret about the vice president’s affair. The honeypot had worked because the nanny presented herself to Adams as a closet dominatrix. A closet submissive, Adams was putty in her hands. The Russians had audio, video, and a whole catalog of pictures that could ruin Adams life in the public sector altogether: the vice president tied to a bed, a ball-gag in his mouth and blindfold across his face as the younger nanny whipped him with a cat of nine tails.
In short, the Russians now had a hold over Vice President Grant Adams, a hold Plankov was all-too-ready to exploit.
4.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to drive so you can hold your dad?” Trey asked from the passenger seat, the black box containing Thom’s father’s ashes held snuggly between his legs. Thom turned on the Jeep and pulled out of the parking lot, navigating to the highway that headed south out of town. “Nah,” he laughed, “I’m good.”
The last time Thom had been on his father’s ranch, he was 18 years old and preparing to leave for Emory. A few months later, when Thom wondered aloud if he needed to come home for Christmas on one of their monthly phone calls, his father had said, “If you need to save the money, don’t worry about it.” Those monthly phone calls had then become every few months, and from there, Thom could remember six month stretches he didn’t communicate with his only living relative. Thom and Trey drove mostly in silence, and when they hit the highway, it was hard to hear the soft voices of NPR as the strong winds circled about them in the topless Jeep. Thom switched the radio off and drove 14 miles south out of the city, if Amarillo can be called that, exiting amidst a billboard for Palo Duro Canyon and beside a single Phillips-66 gas station, where he had pumped gas and bought beer countless times as a teenager.
From the highway, they turned onto Farm Road 7429 and drove west another two miles. Then Thom stopped the Jeep at a packed dirt road with a cattleguard and a small gate, Triple T Ranch emblazoned in a rusty steel logo overhead. They looked around them for a bit. The ranch was big, though smaller than it once had been. About 75 acres now. This dirt road separated, too, his father’s two endeavors: grazing fields for longhorns to the east, cotton fields beginning to sprout to the west, long irrigation ditches torn like veins in the earth. Thom drove the Jeep down the dirt road, where a simple wooden farmhouse in need of painting stood a half-mile down. Someone will have to harvest that cotton, he thought, or it’ll go to waste. “So,” Trey said finally, “This is where you grew up.” Thom snorted, “This is it, the homestead my father inherited from his father, who inherited it from his father, who probably stole it from somebody else. What a legacy!” They laughed, parking beside the lawyer’s sedan, who had beat them to the ranch.
She stood on the front porch, wearing a smart suit with a pencil skirt and her hair pulled back into a low pony tail. She couldn’t have been much older than Thom, mid-thirties at most, and her whole person surprised Thom somehow. She wasn’t who Thom expected to be his father’s lawyer, not for the least of the things that she was a she. She walked over as Thom and Trey got out of the Jeep. “You must be Thom,” she extended her hand, “You look just like your father.” But she had extended her hand to Trey, who pointed to Thom, and the two men laughed. Thom smiled broadly, “I look like my mother. This is my friend Trey.” She apologized, and the trio headed to the porch.
“Thom, I know you said you don’t have any interest in keeping the ranch. I don’t imagine we’ll have trouble finding a buyer, and,” she flipped to a page in the portfolio she held and scanned it with her finger, “the last time it was appraised, three years ago, it was valued at $4.2 million.” Thom was shocked, and Trey joked, “I know who’s buying dinner tonight!” Thom shot him a look and asked, “How is that possible? My grandfather had sold off most of the land by the time I was born.” The lawyer looked through her records, “Yes, but about 17 years ago,” about the time Thom left for college, “your father began buying back the land of the original ranch. He told me he wanted you and your husband, and any kids you might have, to get a better inheritance someday.”
Thom didn’t know the man of whom she spoke. It certainly was not his father. The lawyer took Thom through a series of paperwork he needed to sign, mostly papers turning over responsibility for the sale of the estate to her and her team, which Thom was glad to do. When they were finished, she slipped the portfolio into her slim briefcase, “Your father kept a pretty sparse house, I know, but if you want to go
through the house and take anything you want, and if y’all want to look around the ranch for a bit, I’ll give you some privacy. Just lock the gate behind you when you leave.”
Thom thanked her. As she left up the long driveway, he turned to Trey, “Want to see if my old weed stash is still upstairs?”
5.
Ambassador Anderson shut the office door swiftly behind the vice president, and asked Natalie to hold all his calls for the rest of the afternoon. Back in his office, he called a friend he had on the inside of the G.R.U., asking about the Russian president and foreign minister’s schedules following the hospital opening. “They’re having dinner with your vice president before he returns to Washington,” the woman told Anderson, who checked the official schedule Adams’ team had finally sent to his office. The dinner was not on it. “Paul,” his friend continued, “I need to meet you. Our usual bar, one hour?” she asked. “See you there, thank you,” he said, terminating the call.
Anderson walked over to the urn on his bookcase, bringing its contents back over to his desk. He slipped one of the passports and the gun into the interior pocket of his overcoat, returned the box and secured it in the urn, and left, telling Natalie, “I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a great night.”
Chapter Eleven
1.
Foreign Minister Dimitri Plankov held Vice President Adams’ elbow and guided him to a yellow-lit loading dock 15 yards away from both of their security details. The two men hated each other, and both men found that hatred to be potentially useful, especially Plankov in moments like this. “Mr. Adams you are representing your country at the NATO summit next month in Madrid?” Plankov asked, a rhetorical question Adams knew simply to nod in affirmation to, given that Plankov already knew this to be true and surely planned to exploit it.
“We need you to do us a little favor.” Adams knew the favor would not be little. The Russians had made it clear early on after revealing their knowledge of his carnal secret that they would be calling on him. And yet, in the nearly three years since they had only called on him to attend events in Moscow, not for him to pull any strings or, as Adams expected they might, for him to commit treason. But that was all about to change.
“The Czechs are going to introduce a measure to repeal Article 5.” Article 5 of the NATO charter was the central consequence of membership in the alliance of nations. Ratified on April 4, 1949, the article was in direct response to the Cold War in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the former a war of ideologies and nation-building which pitted the United States and her allies against the Soviet Union and her allies in a battle for reshaping the globe. It read: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” Collective defense meant that if one NATO nation was attacked, the rest agreed to intervene militarily on that nation’s behalf against the attacker. If the Russians had gotten the Czechs to propose a repeal of Article 5, a measure that would only pass if the United States backed it, then it meant only one thing: Russia planned on attacking a NATO nation.
“Mr. Vice President,” Plankov continued, “You need to speak out for this repeal and to ensure it passes.”
2.
His father’s house was hazily dark. Not a single light on, but the West Texas sun streaking through plain and tall white cotton curtains blowing lightly in the open windows. Thom recognized every piece of furniture exactly as it had been more than a decade ago. A tufted blue sofa his mother had bought before she died facing the fireplace, flanked by two straight-back chairs with cane seats, chairs that had been on the ranch for generations. At the other end of the room, the television sat in a cabinet otherwise crowded by the novels his father devoured: some Westerns, but mostly spy thrillers set during World War II. If only his father could see what Thom was doing now. Would he be proud? Thom doubted it. He was never a real spy, it seemed, just a computer nerd with a deep knowledge of global politics, mostly. Across from the television cabinet was his father’s recliner. A heavy-grain leather Laz-Y-Boy, the only expensive thing Thom ever saw his father buy for himself.
Thom walked to the recliner, rubbed one of its arms with his open palm, then turned to Trey, “Come see my room.” The boys bounded up the stairs as if they were teenagers sneaking away from dinner to go smoke weed, which was the hope. Thom’s room was at the end of the hall to the right, past the guest room and opposite his parents’ bedroom. All the doors were closed, and Thom tiptoed down the hall like he had so many times so many years ago until he reached his room. He turned the knob three quarters to the left so it wouldn’t creak as he opened the door, a muscle memory that surprised him, somehow, but shouldn’t have.
The room was exactly as Thom had left it. A pair of Converse All-Stars perched at the foot of the bed, shoes covered in anarchy symbols he’d used a Sharpie to draw on during art class one day. When his father saw them, he’d told Thom he would buy his own shoes from now on. And yet, here they still were. Three posters hung above the bed: Nirvana, Elliot Smith, and one he’d gotten for a donation to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, no doubt a poster he’d hung to piss off his rancher dad. Trey marveled at the Power Rangers bedspread Thom had kept using ironically through high school and Thom walked over to the dresser, opening the top drawer, pushing aside a pile of white gym socks and pulling out an old wooden cigar box. He opened it. Inside was an old pipe and small Ziploc of weed.
“Ohmygod let’s get baked on your dead dad’s ranch!” Trey screamed and they collapsed on the bed laughing. “This was never great weed,” Thom said, and it certainly wouldn’t be any better now. “Who gives a shit?” Trey said as Thom packed the bowl and dug a lighter from the nightstand beside the bed. They passed the pipe back and forth between them, coughing and remembering times they’d smoked with straight boys in high school and college until the bowl was spent. They looked at each other, staring into one another’s eyes, precipitously bloodshot, and smiled.
“Well I’ll be,” Thom said in a thick Texan accent all of a sudden, “I think we are mighty high, buddy.”
3.
“You want me to help topple one of the foundations of Western democracy?” Grant Adams whispered sharply, “I don’t think so!”
Plankov shook his head, and a soft whistle of breath escaped between his thin, pursed lips. “Mr. Vice President, need I remind you that any number of American or British newspapers would be glad to receive a large bundle of evidence about your affair with the nanny, and especially the details of that affair?” Just then, one of Plankov’s assistants approached the men. “Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt, but the president is requesting the honor of your presence on the stage with him immediately.” Plankov smiled, “Da, da, of course,” and turned away from Adams to follow the aide.
Adams grabbed the foreign minister’s arm, “Leak it. I don’t give a damn.” Plankov clicked his tongue three times and shook his head, “We shall continue this conversation tonight at dinner,” before turning and walking away from the American vice president.
4.
Ambassador Anderson left his office with his gun and fake passport tucked safely into the inside pocket of his light overcoat. He walked down the back stairwell to the security office, where the lead agent of his security detail, Andrew McKesson, sat filing security briefings at his desktop computer. “McKesson,” Anderson said, “Let’s go for a ride.” When Anderson said this, McKesson knew it meant Anderson needed to fly below radar, to be driven to a bar across the river to meet his G.R.U. asset and to not have the trip logged into the official embassy log. McKesson grabbed the keys to the ambassador’s armored Range Rover, walked beside Anderson to the underground garage just outside his office, and drove them through the rear security gate. As they pulled out onto Bolshoy Devyantinsky Lane, little more than an alley, McKesson checked the rearview mirror to ensure they weren’t being tailed, by either Russians or U.S. embassy personnel.
Kamchatka was a non-descript dive bar on th
e edge of the old warehouse district, buildings that had long ago lost their industries and been converted into lofts for Moscow’s burgeoning bourgeoise, a middle class of freelance graphic designers and web developers and language tutors. Kamchatka was a flight of stairs down from street level in an alley on the backside of one of these buildings, and since they were driving in central Moscow’s rush hour commute, they arrived 45 minutes after leaving the embassy. McKesson parked the Rover down the block and Anderson walked to the bar’s entrance, hoping his G.R.U. friend would still be waiting for him. When he walked into the bar, he glanced down the counter and saw just her hand lift above the booth in front of her, waving him over with a flick of the wrist.
Anderson walked to the last booth, tucked into a corner by the backdoor, which led up a few steps and into a small interior courtyard filled with garbage bins for residents from the lofts above. “Vanessa,” he smiled, “To what do I owe this distinct pleasure?”
“Sit down, you old flirt,” she smiled back as Anderson slid into the vinyl booth across from her. Vanessa Striknovik sat with a small glass of wheat-colored before her. Like her friend Andrei Popov, she was an anti-Communist who, perhaps surprisingly, ended up working in the Russian intelligence service in hopes of preventing the agency from returning to the ways of the K.G.B. Under the Vasily administration, this hope had become increasingly hopeless. Popov had introduced Paul and Vanessa years ago. When Anderson was sent to Moscow as the new American ambassador, Vanessa approached him, offering intelligence. She was beautiful, but in an unassuming way, deep chestnut hair that reached down to her shoulders, unlike so many of the blonde women who populated Russia’s brightest city. She always wore stylish clothes, blazers over threadbare but expensive t-shirts, dark jeans and sleek American motorcycle boots. When she retired, Vanessa dreamed of riding a motorcycle across India.