by Owen Chance
Plankov walked over to the nightstand where, below his portrait, Alexander’s wallet and cellphone lay waiting for the boy. He liked to slip some rubles in Alexander’s wallet, which he went to do now, because he worried the boy wasn’t eating enough, knowing Alexander was barely able to afford his room at the technological university near the Kremlin. Alexander was skinny, and not from hours in the gym. No, he did have the sinewy muscles of a boy who had known a rough life, and a single tattoo of a tiny star above the perfect dimple of his right ass cheek, a tattoo Plankov liked to trace again and again after they’d made love and Alexander slept on his stomach beside him. As Petrov opened the boy’s wallet, a slip of paper fell to the floor. Petrov bent to pick it up, and turned the paper over to read an address. Bolshoy Devyatinsky Lane 8. The address of the United States Embassy in Moscow.
Alexander turned off the shower and shook himself dry. He stepped out and grabbed a fresh towel from the cabinet beside the sinks, and as he opened the door said sweetly, “Good morning, Dimitri! Did you sleep well?” The Foreign Minister sat on the edge of the bed and pulled Alexander into him, “Da, da,” kissing his bare chest. Alexander twisted to see a clock on the nightstand next to his wallet and cellphone. 6:22. “Dimitri,” he kissed the top of Plankov’s head, “I must hurry.” Plankov let him go, and Alexander pulled a jumpsuit from the bottom drawer of a gilded dresser taking up the entirety of one of the room’s walls. It was the jumpsuit worn by all of Moscow’s sanitation workers, a jump suit that allowed him to slip out of the Foreign Minister’s house every morning unnoticed just as the garbage was picked up at precisely 6:31 a.m. every day.
Plankov kissed Alexander as the boy put his hand on the room’s doorknob. It was, he knew, the last time they would kiss.
3.
Thom fidgeted nervously in his chair, sitting outside the ambassador’s office waiting for him to finish a call with the secretary of state. “Honey,” Natalie asked him, “are you okay?” Thom smiled, and nodded, though he knew he couldn’t fool Natalie, who’d known him too long by this point. He had to confront Anderson about the email he’d found. “Just not looking forward to this conversation,” Thom answered, and Natalie smiled knowingly as the ambassador opened his office door. “Thom, Thom, come in. Natalie, hold all calls, please.” Anderson smiled at Natalie, and closed the door behind Thom.
It was still early in the day. Anderson had yet to move from the couches to his grand desk, and a splattering of newspapers, a plate with half-eaten toast smeared with strawberry jam, and a carafe of coffee littered the coffee table. The ambassador’s iPad sat on the sofa, and he moved it so Thom could sit next to him. “Coffee?” he asked Thom, and when Thom nodded, the ambassador poured him a cup. “There’s sugar and cream on the cart if you want it. So,” Anderson said, strangely perky this morning, “what do you need to talk me about?”
Since discovering the email, Thom had gone around and around on how to broach the topic with the ambassador. He had finally decided directness was the best approach with his friend, but as he began to speak, he felt as if his stomach was rising into his throat. Thom hiccuped once, then twice, then three times in quick succession. Anderson knew Thom was nervous, and rushed over to the cart beside the lounge area, pouring a glass of water and handing it to his friend. Thom gulped the water, then cleared his throat, setting the glass down on the coffee table and handing Anderson a printout of the embedded email attachment. “Paul, I’m just going to ask, are you trying to frame the vice president?”
Anderson looked at Thom curiously, though not with anger, and then read the paper Thom had handed him. “I trust your dinner with Vice President Adams went according to plan,” the message read simply, and in the message’s header fields, his own email address appeared as the message’s sender, with Foreign Minister Dimitri Plankov its recipient. Anderson, bewildered, shook his head, “Thom, I swear I never sent this email. You have to believe me. You know how much I despise Plankov, and though I am no fan of Grant Adams, I couldn’t imagine…” The ambassador’s iPad dinged on the sofa between them, alerting him to a new email. Thom believed his friend, his mentor, his boss, and suddenly made an observation that had escaped him all night.
“I believe you, Paul. I do. But that means you’ve been hacked, and the hacker knows what they’re doing. And they’re playing a long game.” Thom paused. “Building up evidence for something.” Thom picked up Anderson’s iPad. He had a suspicion of how the hacker had breached the American ambassador’s secure email.
4.
Thom texted Petrov, “Gotta work late tonight. Sorry. XOXO,” cancelling their dinner date and inevitable sleepover. This was just as well, the Russian thought, and Petrov texted back, “Not a problem! Fight the good fight. XOXO.” All day, all week, he’d been exhausted. Staying up late with Thom, getting up early to workout with Drago, then heading to a job he now dreaded. He could use the night alone.
Petrov made a smoothie for dinner, not wanting to cook or venture out. He poured Jinx a bowl of kibble and then threw strawberries, spinach, protein powder, and oat milk into the blender. As he sipped his smoothie, he and Jinx watched a badly dubbed and old episode of Grey’s Anatomy. The surgeons worked on a man who’d been brought in, a man who’d been tortured until he’d given up his company’s bank account information to some high-level thieves. They had tied the man to a chair in a warehouse, Petrov learned, and taken out his non-vital organs one by one. Petrov looked back to his text from Thom. Thom had been working on something he had to hide from Petrov, and suddenly, Petrov knew what he had to do.
Petrov pulled Jinx from his lap, grabbed his keys, and ran down the stairs to the parking garage below his building. He’d drive to the embassy, and surprise Thom. “I know you can’t spend the night,” he’d say through the phone at the embassy guard gate, “But surely you need to have dinner? I know a great café just a few blocks away.” Thom would relent, and when he slid into Petrov’s car, Petrov would lean in for a kiss but hold the chloroform-soaked rag to Thom’s mouth and nose. He’d take him to a warehouse, tie him up, and get the information the G.R.U. wanted him to get, a series of scalpels laid out on the table beside the chair where Thom would sit, panic-stricken and having a crisis of enormous proportions, all at the hands of his new lover.
A loud bang woke Petrov up, and he jumped from his chair, sending Jinx flying across the small living room. On the television, a late-night thriller now played, and a crooked cop had just shot an innocent man. Grey’s Anatomy was long over, and the gunfire had startled Petrov awake. Petrov looked at his watch. 1:14 in the morning. He’d been dreaming for hours.
5.
It was just past one in the morning when Alexander Hungravich left the university library. He’d been studying for a petroleum engineering final, but Dimitri had messaged him, “Come over.” A few weeks into their affair, Dimitri, or his assistant rather, had bought Alexander a car, saying “So you’re not using public transportation to come back and forth to the residence. Park down the block.” Alexander had been elated, jumping up and down on the bed that night as he told Dimitri how fast the small BMW could go, and Dimitri grinned from ear to ear, “But please, my darling, be careful.” Alexander pulled away from the library and headed east, opting for the expressway so he could drive fast and hard.
The Central Moscow Expressway crisscrosses the Volga River as it unwinds through the city’s heart. It was late, and had been raining, and though Alexander drove fast, faster than he should, he knew to slow at the sharp bend in the highway, mirroring a sharp bend in the river, ahead. As he approached the bridge, he tapped the car’s breaks, but they didn’t seem to slow him down. He pumped harder, then frantically, pulled on the BMW’s emergency brake beside him. This, too, had no effect.
The police told Alexander Hungravich’s family their son had died upon impact with the bridge’s concrete embankment, though they certainly couldn’t know if he died then, or when his body was tossed through the windshield, crushed under the weight of the
car as it landed atop him at the bottom of the freezing river, where it bended west and ran especially shallow. His parents believed this story, they had no reason not to, but they wondered how their son had afforded such a nice car in the first place.
Chapter Fifteen
1.
Since Thom had been back in Moscow, he and Petrov had slipped into a comfortable routine. They met every morning at Nude Coffee for breakfast after Thom had run his requisite five miles and Petrov had boxed with Drago. Most nights — well, every night until last night, when Thom had to work late — the two had dinner after work, fed Petrov’s cat Jinx, and then slept at the Metropol Hotel. Thom was beginning to see his work here would not soon be over, and to think maybe he should find an apartment. But for now the ambassador seemed fine with paying for the luxury hotel, so he and Petrov took advantage of the huge bed and steam shower as much as they could.
Thom waited in a booth by the window, sipping his coffee and eating oatmeal with sliced strawberries and peanut butter, which was hard to find in Russia. Before him lay a stack of papers, which his father’s lawyer back in Texas had emailed late last night. Upon final survey of his family’s ranch — well, his ranch — oil deposits were found on a large parcel his father had re-acquired. “Thom,” she had written, “The attached offer is a good one. Oil prices are low right now, and you could get more in a few years, maybe, but that’s a big maybe. The highest bid is $10.5 million. Let me know how you want to proceed.” Jesus H. Christ, Thom thought, ten-and-a-half million for a ranch he’d loathed for most of his life. He pulled up some pictures of him and his mother around the main house on his phone. Yes, he’d sell the ranch. It’d be a good retirement fund, more than enough. But he wanted to go see it one last time when this mess in Moscow was over, and he hoped, or allowed himself to hope, that Petrov might go with him.
Thom checked the time on his phone. 7:04 a.m. Petrov was usually there by 7:00, but Thom went back to the New York Times sitting beside the contracts the lawyer had sent. He read a report on the upcoming NATO summit in Madrid. The summit itself was of little import, it seemed, but at the end of the article, the Times explained how President Vasily and representatives of the Russian Federation were planning a visit to Madrid to meet with their “dear friends in NATO,” an organization largely existing in opposition to Russia’s historical bids for power, at the conclusion of their summit. The Times reporter seemed not to think this a big deal, and maybe it wasn’t, but in the very least it struck Thom as odd.
A barista came over and asked, “Is your friend not joining you this morning?” Thom looked up from his newspaper, said “Hmmmmm,” and checked his phone, 7:16. “I think so, but he should be here by now.” The barista shrugged and cleared a nearby table. Thom texted Petrov, “Not coming to breakfast?” Almost immediately, he received a reply, “Sorry. I forgot about a meeting at work this morning.” It was an odd reply, strangely matter-of-fact, and Thom hoped Petrov wasn’t upset with him for cancelling their sleepover last night.
2.
“Mickey!” the president of the United States of America yelled as her beloved French bulldog humped the leg of Vice President Grant Adams, “Down boy, down!” Adams smiled politely, trying to get the damn dog off of his leg. The president waved over an aide, who took Mickey and left the room, closing the door behind him. At the center of the Oval Office, two long sofas held four people. President Meredith Myers and her chief of staff, Thomas Wilson, sat opposite Vice President Grant Adams and his chief of staff, Sullivan Andrews. Normally, any of these three men held their own amongst world leaders or captains of industry or military chiefs of the most powerful nations. But President Meredith Myers commanded the attention of any room she entered.
Myers had been the first democratic majority leader in the United States Senate since the turn of the century, and the first woman from either political party to hold this position since that body’s formation in the late eighteenth century. Before the senate, Myers had taken her father’s local hardware store and franchised it across their home state of Minnesota. From there the business expanded across the Upper Midwest, then across the nation, and was now growing steadily in overseas markets. Under Myers’s leadership, the business grew from one location to more than 3,000. Myers and her daughter, now C.E.O. of Myers Stores International, built their business by employing single mothers and the formerly incarcerated, offering job training and educational benefits and childcare for all employees at every level. As Myers became mayor of Minneapolis, then a United States Congresswoman, then a United States Senator, then Secretary of Treasury, and now the 52nd President of the United States of America, she carried with her the progressive and populist politics coupled with an unmatched and unwavering tenacity which had made her known since her earliest days working in that first hardware store.
Vice President Grant Adams was a rare breed: a Southern democrat who had served in the Marine Corps and believed, above all else, in personal responsibility. And he viewed President Myers, to whom he’d lost a bitter primary battle, as what she unapologetically was: a bleeding heart liberal who believed in the social good.
Russia had a horrible human rights record, from forced sterilization of women and imprisonment of the nation’s gay populations, to blatant infringement on the sovereignty of independent nations. Myers sat shocked by what Adams was proposing. “Let me get this straight, Grant,” she said, “You want us to back a Czech proposal to repeal the central amendment of the organization charged with protecting us and our allies from our primary foe for over the last 75 years?” Myers turned to Wilson beside her, and they both laughed as Adams and Andrews sat stone-faced across from them. She continued, “Buddy, I don’t know what you’re thinking with this, but enlighten me.”
Adams, however, also did not know what he was thinking. On the one hand, he faced false but plausible charges of treason by refusing to help Vasily’s government. On the other, he faced committing actual treason on behalf of America’s most storied enemy, treason that could trigger any number of atrocities across Europe, then across the world, but treason that would likely never see the light of day. On the first day of his officer training in the Marine Corps, a sergeant had begun his lecture to Adams and the other cadets by explaining, “The definition of character is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. As an officer in the Marines, there will be many times nobody is looking. But the question is: do you possess character?” Adams wasn’t sure he did, or even that he had for a long time. “Madame President, I think our European allies are largely mistaken when they claim…”
A knock rang from the door to the Oval Office, and the Secretary of Defense soon appeared as the in the doorway. “Excuse me, ma’am, but we need you in the situation room.” Myers stood, followed by the three men gathered around the sofas in her office. “Grant, I look forward to continuing this conversation. For now, you must excuse me,” she said, and turned to leave, giving the vice president another chance to find his character, or to move the world towards war.
3.
Natalie brought a tray of tea and small cookies into the office of Ambassador Paul Anderson, where he sat in silence across from Russian Foreign Minister Dimitri Plankov. The tea service was a gift from Czar Alexander II to President Andrew Johnson upon the American purchase of the Alaska territories on October 18, 1867. It was the finest and thinnest Russian porcelain, gilded in gold around the rim, gold likely stolen from the Russian pillaging of Mongolia just prior to the sale of its North American acquisition. She poured each man a cup and served them. Ambassador Anderson took his tea like his coffee, black. Foreign Minister Plankov took his tea with cream and four cubes of sugar, she knew well, but she did not prepare his tea for him; she simply set the cream pitcher and sugar bowl beside his tea cup, gave a quick smile and nod to the ambassador, and left the two men to their own devices.
“Mr. Ambassador, I want to thank you for entertaining my meeting today,” Plankov broke the silence. Anderson forced a quick laugh, “D
id I have a choice?” Plankov ignored this question; both men knew the assassinations of neither Vanessa Striknovik, nor Andrei Popov would be on the agenda, though Plankov counted on their deaths underlying what he was about to request of the American ambassador. “Your feelings about me and my government aside, I would like to work with you on a peace initiative, Mr. Ambassador, an initiative to strengthen the United Nations and bring the world together on projects of mutual benefit.” The ambassador sipped his tea, but he had to admit, his interest was piqued. “I must say this surprises me, Mr. Plankov, but I’m intrigued.” Plankov handed a dossier of the Russian’s peace plan to Anderson, and stood, “Mr. Ambassador, I look forward to discussing this with you very soon.” They shook hands, and Plankov excused himself. Per usual, Plankov had demanded an audience at an inconvenient time, and an audience that lasted only minutes before he excused himself. Anderson sighed, and carried the dossier to his desk, gathering his things for the flight to the Popov’s seaside estate.