by Owen Chance
5.
Thom headed straight for the ambassador’s office when Petrov dropped him off at the embassy. Natalie was on the phone when Thom reached the fifth floor, and waved him inside. Anderson sat at his desk, changing the bandages on his right hand. His head was banged up badly, and a set of stitches shown just below his right eye. “What the hell happened?” Thom asked, suddenly panicked. Anderson had to come clean with him.
“Vanessa Striknovik has been my G.R.U. asset since I left the C.I.A. for this post three years ago. She was a friend, Thom, a good friend Popov had introduced me to when I first came to Moscow for The Company right after the Soviet fall back in the ‘90s. Like me, like Popov, she shared a hope for Russia at the end of the Cold War: that our two nations might work together to build a more peaceful world. But I don’t have to tell you President Vasily and his cabinet have made this dream nearly impossible. And like me and Popov, Vanessa thought our Vice President was colluding with her government.”
The ambassador paused, wiping a tear from his eye, then continued, “Last night I met Vanessa at a bar at her request. When I got up to use the bathroom, Thom, she was assassinated. I left through the back door, and was attacked.” Anderson gestured to his eye, “Banged up pretty bad, but I’m okay.” Again, the ambassador paused. Thom asked, “And your attacker?” Anderson shook his head, “Neutralized,” handing a cellphone to Thom. “It’s locked, but I figure you can sweep it. Probably not much there, but who knows. I don’t think the guy expected anyone to come out of that bar, and he didn’t look like a typical field agent.”
Thom turned the cellphone over in his hands, nodding. Anderson cleared his throat, “Thom, I’m sorry for whatever is about to happen. This all appears, this all is, dangerous, and I understand if you want to leave.” Thom thought for a second. Back in Washington, nothing awaited him except divorce papers and the hunt for a new apartment. And more than that, Anderson trusted him, and it looked like an international crisis might be slowly imploding right under theor noses. He hoped it wasn’t too late to stop it, and that he could help. Thom shook his head no, “Paul, I’m not going anywhere. We’ll figure this out together.”
Thom didn’t tell the ambassador he’d just slept with a Russian agent, not yet.
Ambassador Anderson smiled. He didn’t tell Thom he know Thom was dating a G.R.U. agent, potentially compromised, not yet.
Chapter Thirteen
1.
“Can I get you anything else, Mr. Vice President?” the steward asked as Air Force Two leveled out at 50,000 feet somewhere over Romania. She sat a heavy, cut crystal tumbler — three ice cubes, and a four finger pour of North Carolina whiskey — on the desk before Grant Adams. “No thank you, Rebekah,” Adams replied, and she turned to leave the Boeing C-32’s office cabin. On the far wall, Sullivan Andrews, Adams’ chief of staff, reclined on a leather sofa reading a briefing on United Nations aide for the drought-stricken southern Balkans. Adams took a long pull of the whiskey and sat the glass back down with a thud.
“Have I ever told you,” he asked Andrews, “about the time my buddy Brody and I holed up in a goat barn in Kandahar while we waited…”
Andrews cut him off, “Yes, sir. Several times in fact.” Andrews’ honest indignation turned some people off, but Adams found it refreshing. His chief of staff never bull shit him because he was the Vice President of the United States. “Oh,” Adams said, taking another pull of the whiskey and forming a perfect “o” with the rim of his lips, an “o” squeezed out at the center of the beard that he was grooming on the bottom half of his face. Truth be told, it was a story he had told countless times on the campaign trail and at fundraisers over the last seven years, first as he ran for senate, then as he was the vice presidential nominee under Governor Meredith Myers. But truth be told, it was a story he never divulged quite right.
United States Marine Corps First Lieutenant Grant Adams was elected to the United States Senate after serving as a district attorney in Charlotte, North Carolina, a job he worked his way up to after attending law school at Duke, a law school he attended after becoming a war hero in Afghanistan. Stationed with the marine’s second battalion in southeastern Kandahar Province, in a tiny checkpoint village on the border with Pakistan, Adams’ unit hadn’t seen much action since the president had delivered a victory speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln before a banner reading “Mission Accomplished.” Then in a single night, all hell broke loose.
Grant Adams was patrolling the eastern edge of his unit’s base when a firefight broke out behind him. He turned just in time to see their barracks explode, to see the few of his fellow marines not asleep in the barracks rush out of the admin office or storage depot with their weapons drawn, only to be gunned down by an ambush of Taliban forces. Adams ducked behind a cropping of boulders and called in the attack on the sat phone all patrolmen keep strapped to their Kevlar vest. “We’ll be there in 15 minutes,” the commander on the other end of the line said, “Save who you can, Lieutenant Adams.”
Just before the former president pinned the Medal of Honor to the lapel of Adams’ dress uniform, he spoke to the crowd gathered in the White House rose garden, including Adams’ mother and fiancé Abigail. “First Lieutenant Grant Adams was the sole survivor of a surprise Taliban attack on Camp Losano. And yet, as hell rained down upon his unit, Adams ran into the danger, representing the heart of semper fidelis, always faithful.” At his debriefing after the attack, when he was lifted out of Kandahar to Bagram Airfield, nobody asked Adams if he had tried to save anyone in his unit. They had assumed he had run towards the danger, not hidden behind a rock. And maybe this assumption was enough, Adams had concluded, but the weight of the lie had been his alone to grunt ever since.
2.
The shooting outside the bar Kamchatka that Ambassador Anderson had fled had yet to hit the news. No report of it appeared on television, in newspapers, or online. Anderson and Thom both suspected the story of the murdered G.R.U. agent Vanessa Striknovik and the unknown assailant would vanish. And for now, they thought, perhaps this was best.
It didn’t take Thom long to unlock the phone Ambassador Anderson had given him. It was no agent’s phone, but the device used by Sergei Lindstrum, one of Foreign Minister Dimitri Plankov’s personal assistants and most trusted aides. And though Thom wasn’t surprised he was able to unlock it in tact, naturally the phone held little to no evidence of the foreign minister’s dive into the dark web of international espionage. It did, however, reveal how Lindstrum was tasked with much of Plankov’s mundane daily business. Scheduling meetings, editing speeches and correspondence, and occasionally picking up dry cleaning. But what shocked Thom was a primary function of the phone he had never suspected.
One of Lindstrum’s duties, it became quickly apparent, was using the app Grindr to arrange for escorts to be brought to the foreign minister. Very young and exclusively male escorts.
3.
Grant Adams had dozed off and on as Air Force Two zoomed far above the Atlantic Ocean during the night, dreaming of exploding poppy fields in Afghanistan and waking with a start as they began their final descent into Washington. He glanced at his watch, 5:27 a.m. If he hurried up his detail, Adams hoped he could get home to crawl into bed with Abigail before she woke up and took the children down to the Outer Banks on the North Carolina coast, to the beautiful beach house he’d renovated after inheriting it from his grandmother.
A knock came on the vice president’s private cabin’s door. “Sir,” Sullivan Andrews said, opening the door slowly, “Would you like to go over the morning’s schedule?”
Groggily, Adams replied, “Sully, I’d like to clear the morning until 10. I need to see Abi and the kids before they leave.” Sullivan frowned, “I’m sorry. That’s not possible. We have a debrief at State as soon as we land, then prep for your meeting on the NATO summit in the West Wing. That meeting’s on the books for 9:30, and I’ve already spoken with the president’s scheduler; we can’t push it back.”
Sullivan was a bachelor in his late thirties and a stickler for schedules. He’d been adopted as a young boy, raised an only child on the upper peninsula of Michigan. And Sullivan rarely spoke of his adoptive parents, a wealthy older couple, who died in a car accident during his freshman year at Dartmouth. Adams always felt bad pushing Sullivan for family time to be put on his schedule, and even when he did, Sullivan was not apt to grant it. Perhaps this was one of the reasons he was such an effective chief of staff. But Adams, slightly hungover and completely wrecked with worry, was not in the mood today. “I’m not asking, Sully, I’m informing you.”
Sullivan and the vice president came to a head over the daily schedule from time to time, but today Sullivan was resolved to not let his acquiescence to Adams’ whim lead to their détente. The chief of staff softly closed the door behind him, and walked over to the couch where Adams sprawled on a long sofa, barefoot with his suit jacket balled up on the floor. He picked up his boss’s blazer, shaking out the wrinkles and smoothing the jacket’s back with the open palm of his hand. “Sir,” he began, “With all due respect, given the nature of your dinner with the Russians, do you think it wise to cancel your meeting with the president this morning?” Adams squinted at Sullivan, searching his eyes for their motivation, and found nothing but a blank stare. The vice president let out a quick exhale, sitting up on the sofa and taking the blazer from his chief of staff.
“You’re right,” he said, standing up and slipping on the jacket, then his loafers, “Keep the schedule as is. That will be all for now, Sully.” Sullivan left the vice president. The vice president sat at his desk as the plane let down its landing gear, thinking back to his conversations with Sullivan from the last ten hours, and wondering what he had told him about his dinner with Vasily and Plankov: if he had let his drunken tongue slur to a grave slip, or whether the knowledge came from some other place altogether.
4.
“Natalie!” Ambassador Anderson yelled into the speaker on his desk, “A word, please.” From the other end, “Mr. Ambassador, I’m on the other line with the Eurasia chief back in D.C. and she wants…” but Anderson interrupted her, “Now!”
Exactly three seconds later, Natalie Paulson opened the door to the ambassador’s interior office. He was perched on the edge of his desk with the day’s schedule in its leather dossier gripped tightly in his hands. They looked at each other, and it was clear, if it hadn’t been already, he was fuming. “Why is Foreign Minister Plankov on my schedule tomorrow afternoon, Natalie, when I am supposed to be traveling to Anapa to help Sylvia Popov bury her husband?” Per Orthodox custom, his friend’s body had been lying in state following his funeral in the small chapel on his estate on the Black Sea. Natalie knew Anderson’ fondness for the Popovs. And she knew, too, how on edge he’d been since his friend’s death. Even more so following his trip on the way from bed to the bathroom the other night, which had landed him the row of four stitches below his right eye, he’d told her the next day, given that not even Natalie knew of his friend at G.R.U. and their frequent meetings, the last of which had ended badly for all parties involved.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ambassador,” Natalie replied, “But the foreign minister requested an audience today. I have scheduled a helicopter to take you to the Popovs straight from your meeting, and Mrs. Popov has agreed to delay the burial until you arrive at 7:30.”
Anderson fumed. “You asked Sylvia to postpone the burial so that I could meet with that snake?” The ambassador and Russia’s foreign minister had long been at odds. Paul Anderson had been C.I.A., and Dimitri Plankov had been K.G.B. before the Soviet fall; that they could peacefully work together now would have been a bigger surprise to anyone who knew anything about the two nations’ histories than the rivalry and animosity that marked the two men’s relationship. And Natalie knew this more than anyone. “Natalie, I don’t know what the hell has gotten…”
But Natalie interrupted her boss, the man she’d known for the better part of two decades. “Sir, he sent over this.” She handed him a picture. He looked down at himself, chatting with Vanessa Striknovik in a booth at a dimly lit bar just three days prior, a picture that must have been snapped just before Vanessa was assassinated. “That will be all, Natalie,” he said quietly, but keeping the picture.
She walked to the door, but before she could leave, the ambassador said, “And Natalie,” Natalie turned around to hear him say in a choked whisper, “I’m sorry.”
5.
Like any gay man, Thom had seen his share of porn staring Russian men in college. Movies of twenty year olds meeting in the showers at their dormitories, or in strangely abandoned soccer fields where they kicked the ball back and forth before quickly abandoning it for each other’s bodies. According to the premium Grindr account his assistant had apparently run for him, these were exactly the type of young men Foreign Minister Dimitri Plankov enjoyed. And conversely, exactly the type of young men Plankov had sent to camps deep in Siberia if their homosexuality was acted out publicly in any way the government labled as inappropriate. As he scrolled through the Grindr account, Thom pondered this paradox, humming a few bars of Aretha’s “Ain’t No Way” over and over. “Oh but how can I, how can I, how can I give you all the things I can if you're tying both of my hands?”
Thom finished his sweep of the phone, more perplexed than he’d ever been. But before he reported back to Anderson what he had found, he sat down at his computer terminal in the basement to sweep the embassy’s communications from the last few days. The algorithms Thom had created made this largely an automated task, and within a few minutes, the sweep returned a single anomaly. A proxy email had been set up, originating in the ambassador’s office. Like a shadow, these emails were able to be sent through secure servers, but provided both sender and recipient a large amount of guaranteed privacy, or anonymity, given how they traveled as embedded attachments in other emails, attachments most sweeps would not know to open. Very few analysts knew a solution to this, but one of the algorithms Thom had designed was able to look simultaneously through both the text and any embedded attachment of a particular email account in a matter of milli-seconds.
Thom looked at the unzipped attachment of the single flagged email on the monitor in front of him. It was a file containing a series of hypertext code. Thom copied this over to a separate program, which decoded the series quickly. The file was from Ambassador Anderson to Foreign Minister Plankov.
“I trust,” the ambassador had written his supposed foe, “your dinner with Vice President Adams went according to plan.”
Chapter Fourteen
1.
“Again!” Drago yelled, resetting the countdown clock on the wall for three minutes. Petrov attacked the speed bag before him with a vengeance. But as Drago watched the kid, he knew Petrov’s concentration was off. He kept missing the bag every fourth punch; the second in rotation with his right fast hook was a millisecond too slow. And now that he thought about, Drago sensed that Petrov’s concentration had been off all week, since he returned from his cousin’s funeral in Samra. The clock buzzed. Drago waved Petrov over to the bench where he sat, patting the spot beside him and handing his athlete a water bottle.
“Kid, I’m worried about you. Where are you?” Drago took the pointer finger on his left hand and tapped Petrov’s skull, “You’re certainly stuck here.” He swept his arms around him, to the gym where every ring was filled with early morning students, “But not present here.”
Petrov squirted water onto his face. As drops fell onto his bare shoulder blades, he shook his head wildly from side to side, sending a mixture of water and sweat all over his coach’s left flank. Then he smiled, and Drago smiled, too. “Truth is, it’s been a rough couple of weeks at work.” This was the understatement of the decade. His own government had kidnapped Petrov, and was now trying to blackmail him into spying on Thom. And even if he had wanted to cooperate, Thom wasn’t offering up any information of consequence. Thom was C.I.A.; Petrov was G.R.U.; they had a
mutually understanding, even if unstated, agreement that they wouldn’t pressure each other to talk about work. That didn’t mean his handlers would get off Petrov’s back, however. Quite the contrary. But for now, Petrov smiled, “I’m sorry, Drago. Keep kicking my ass and I’ll snap out of it.” Drago laughed, and Petrov padded off to the locker room. He had just enough time to shower before meeting Thom for breakfast, a sweet routine they’d fallen into, a routine that made Petrov simultaneously happy, but worry even more.
2.
A small portrait of Foreign Minister Dimitri Plankov’s dead wife hung above the nightstand on the side of the bed on which he slept. It was an oil painting she sat for the week before their wedding; the corresponding portrait of Plankov hung above the opposite nightstand, and thus he rarely saw it except in passing. They had married young. She was only 18, and Plankov, a recent graduate of the military academy in Leningrad, only 22. Her father, like his father, was an intelligence officer in the K.G.B. Two weeks after their wedding, the brakes faulted on the car the young bride was driving, and she careened off a bridge and into the freezing Fontanka River. Her body was never found, likely eaten by bears who happened upon in it as they came out of winter hibernation.
Plankov awoke with a start. He’d been dreaming of his dead wife again, the girl, if he was being honest, he barely knew. But in his dream, her face was crystal clear, somehow moving towards him though encased in ice. He got out of bed and walked over to the window, opening the heavy velvet drapes and letting in the first break of morning sun. It was almost 6:15, and the boy knew he needed to leave the compound by 6:30, so he was already in the shower. He’d left the door from the bathroom to the bedroom open just a crack, and steam rose into the room where Plankov stood at the window. The boy had been raised poor, one of seven children on a farm south of Moscow, and long, hot showers were a luxury to him now. His name was Alexander Hungravich. He would turn 20 next week, and expected an expensive present. For the last three months, he’d been spending several nights a week here. For the last three months, he’d been sleeping with Russian Foreign Minister Dimitri Plankov.