The Kremlin's Candidate

by Jason Matthews

  Breathing hard, Dominika looked at them on the sidewalk, one facedown and unconscious, the other curled up and whimpering, the third still sitting up, staring but not seeing. These three roaches had come close to ruining everything, to exposing her, to sending her to the basement room in Butyrka Prison with the pine-log wall designed to catch ricochets, and the drains in the sloping, brown-stained cement floor placed to sluice away the fluids of the executed prisoners. Five years of unimaginable risks, of narrow escapes, of precious intelligence—measured in linear feet—passed to the Americans, of countless meetings in countless safe houses, only to be nearly unseated by three besotted gopniki two blocks from her apartment. This was another charming part of her Russia too, these louts who were as indolent, and cruel, and predatory as Putin’s inner circle sitting in the jeweled halls of the Kremlin. They were the same cancer. She risked her life, and tonight they had almost ended it. She could be in a freezing cell awash with sewage, or dead and staring out of a cardboard coffin with a cloth tied under her jaw to keep her mouth closed, these animals . . .

  In a rage, Dominika stepped up to the dazed punk, set her feet, and swung her stiffened arm under his chin and into his throat—a Spetsnaz killing stroke—fracturing the hyoid bone and rupturing the larynx. He fell backward and began gasping, eyes staring at the top of the trees.

  “Ublyudok, bastard,” said Dominika, watching his legs jerk.

  She was still shaking so badly three minutes later that the sticky apartment key skittered over the lock before she could open the door with two hands. She left the lights off except for a small lamp near the front door. Her skirt was spotted with something dark and wet. The SRAC message downloaded to her laptop blinked once, flashed green for two seconds—she read the word “Istanbul”—then it went black, with the words “error 5788” appearing on the screen. Chyort, damn it! The gopnik’s head apparently was harder than the components. Now she would have to trigger a cringingly dangerous personal meeting with an officer from Moscow Station—Why couldn’t Nate come to meet her?—to exchange the damaged equipment for a new SRAC set.

  She left her clothes in a pile on the floor, kicked off her shoes, and looked at herself in the mirror. The skin between her knuckles had been torn by the keys, and her hand throbbed. The little lamp cast a shadow over the curves of her body. Five years was a long time. Her figure was softer now, her rib cage didn’t show, and her breasts were fuller. Thank God her stomach was still flat, and her hips had not spread to all points of the compass. The French bikini wax had been a silly impulse, but she was getting used to it. She was satisfied that her legs and ankles were slim.

  Looking at herself suddenly deformed into an out-of-body dream; the image in the mirror was someone else. An unbearable melancholy washed over her. She stifled a sob, momentarily overwhelmed by her situation, by tonight’s danger, and by her whole existence as a spy. Look at you, she thought. What are you doing? Who are you? A ridiculous fanatic fighting alone in the dark, overwhelming dangers arrayed against you, the odds of surviving slim, your friends far away, separated from the man you love. How long will you last? How did her mentor General Korchnoi—he spied for CIA for fourteen years—summon the will and determination to keep going? Dominika blinked as tears slid down the cheeks of the revenant in the mirror. It wasn’t her; it was someone else crying.

  CIULAMA DE PUI—IOANA’S CHICKEN WITH MUSHROOM SUPRÊME SAUCE

  Cut chicken into small pieces, boil in salted water with rough-cut carrot and onion until tender. Make a Suprême Sauce by melting butter, then stir in flour, add chicken stock, egg yolk, and sour cream to make a velvety sauce. Sauté thin-sliced mushrooms in butter, add to the sauce, and finish cooking without boiling. Add chicken pieces, chopped parsley, season, and simmer. Serve with Russian mashed potatoes. (Mix mashed potatoes with sour cream, heavy cream, egg yolks, dill, and butter. Spread half of potatoes on greased pan, layer with caramelized onions, cover with remaining potatoes, and top with sour cream. Bake uncovered.)

  7

  Polestar of Humanity

  Two aides escorted her down the brilliantly lighted corridor, while Dominika composed her features for a last-minute meeting with Gorelikov, probably routine, but she always half expected the room would be full of security goons gathered there to arrest her. The life of a spy.

  She was on the third floor, residential wing of the Senate building, where Lenin and Stalin both had maintained comfortable apartments and where Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, in 1932 committed suicide. With a revolver probably, thought Dominika, after she realized she was married to the messenger of Lucifer on Earth. An aide knocked on a plain wooden door, waited a beat, and then indicated that she should go in. Anton Gorelikov stood from behind the desk in his Kremlin office, a corner room on the north angle of the three-sided Senate building. The office was spacious, lined with bookcases, and richly carpeted in deep red. An ornate crystal chandelier hung from the center of the ceiling. Gorelikov’s desk was littered with papers and folders in assorted colors. How many other operations are you hatching around the world? Dominika thought. Today Gorelikov wore a blue shadow plaid suit by Kiton, a light-blue shirt by Mastai Ferretti, and black knit Gitman Bros. tie. He was more elegant than a London banker—no match for the damp tubs of suet on the Kremlin Security Council.

  “Ready for your trip?” Gorelikov said, arms outstretched in greeting, like a grandfather welcoming a grandchild back home for spring break. Dominika shook his hand and sat gingerly in a plush leather chair in front of his desk, crossed her legs, and told herself not to bounce her foot.

  Gorelikov had read Dominika’s New York ops proposal—a document outlining alias identity, clandestine travel, and meeting protocols with the illegal—which she had wired directly to him last night from SVR headquarters in Yasenevo via an embargoed privacy channel. “Excellent plan, Colonel, excellent tradecraft, quite satisfactory.” He beamed at her as the blue halo around his head shone and pulsed. Strange. He normally didn’t vibrate like this; Gorelikov had some other villainy in mind, she was sure of it. “Sergeant Blokhin is making his own travel arrangements, and he will contact you on arrival. He will lightly countersurveil for you in New York City, but will not, repeat not, accompany you to the meeting with SUSAN the illegal. I made that quite clear to him and Major Shlykov both. If you have any trouble with Blokhin following instructions, abort the meeting rather than risk SUSAN.” Dominika nodded, thinking how in the world she could stop Blokhin from doing anything he wanted to do. Her self-defense moves in Systema could not match his brute strength.

  Dominika had done a little research on Iosip Blokhin. He had served five years in Afghanistan, where in his twenties he led the Spetsnaz Storm 333 assault in 1979 on the Tajbeg Palace to depose Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, killing more than two hundred presidential bodyguards. Unofficial reports documented that he had hung the naked body of the president’s mistress from the balustrade of the palace balcony as a message to the people of Kabul: the Soviets were now in town. Blokhin then reportedly swung the president’s five-year-old son by the heels against the wall, resolving any questions regarding primogeniture.

  But Blokhin was neither a hallucinating veteran nor a psychotic executioner. Dominika was surprised to read that after the war, Blokhin completed noncommissioned officer’s command school, trained with fraternal Special Forces units abroad, learned Vietnamese, and wrote a well-received article on small-unit tactics that had been accepted and included in a classified edition of the newsletter of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Frunze Military Academy. And he showed black bat wings of evil. Savage or savant? She’d have to take care.

  Blokhin and Gorelikov, two ends of the spectrum. Dominika looked out the curtained window over the crenellations onto Red Square and the onion domes of St. Basil’s cathedral and the just-visible roof of Lenin’s mausoleum, hard against the Kremlin wall. The wax mummy of V. I. Lenin under glass in that flowered bier no longer influenced events in No
vorossiya, Putin’s New Russia, but she wondered whether Gorelikov stood at this window and telepathically communed with Lenin and the other visionaries in repose just below in the Kremlin necropolis—Suslov, Dzerzhinsky, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Stalin, the Vozhd, the Master of Mayhem. Did they speak to him from the grave? Did they coach him in the tenets of deceit and betrayal? Gorelikov found the folder, and came around his desk to sit beside Dominika in a matching armchair.

  They spent the next two hours discussing the mission, which Dominika did not need—she could put together an ops plan in her sleep. No, this was Gorelikov co-opting her, drawing her close, offering his affinity and support, she knew. She remembered what Benford had once told her about Kremlin allegiances: Soviet officials used to say that the beginning of one’s ruin was the day one became Stalin’s favorite. Gorelikov gazed up in thought at the chandelier above his head as Dominika spoke. Like every chandelier in the Kremlin, it was wired with a tiny 24-bit/48 kHz digital microphone in the bobeche, the fluted glass cup from which the crystal pendants hung, so she was speaking to the president at the same time.

  She would fly from Paris to Toronto and travel by rail on the Maple Leaf down the Hudson River Valley. US Immigration controls were not as stringent at train stations as at airports. The next matter of business: communications.

  Dominika’s primary mission was to pass two special, 256-bit encrypted EKHO phones to SUSAN designed by Line T to synchronize only with each other, and to defy geolocation by frequency hopping simultaneously between cell towers. SUSAN would give one of the phones to MAGNIT during a personal meet, and the secure commo link would be established. With the delivery of the EKHO phones, MAGNIT, henceforth, would communicate only with SUSAN, an untraceable person, an anonymous American citizen, unknown to the FBI or CIA. Even if personal meetings occasionally were necessary, security would be preserved.

  During her time in the United States, Dominika would have no way securely to communicate with the Kremlin from an official installation—the rezident in New York City at the Russian Consulate on East Ninety-First Street was not briefed and would be unaware of Dominika’s presence in the city. She would be on her own, a point that displeased Shlykov and moved him to insist that Blokhin stay close. Not likely, she thought.

  Gorelikov handed Dominika an envelope with a description of a meeting site located on an island off the coast of New York City called Staten. “An island?” asked Dominika. “How do I get there to meet SUSAN?”

  Gorelikov flipped through the pages. “There apparently is a ferryboat to this Staten Island from Manhattan. The illegal knows how to operate in the city. I’m sure the site is secure.” He handed Dominika a small black-and-white ID photo of SUSAN, and Dominika was surprised to see an attractive blond woman with reading glasses. “This officer has been in the United States since the late nineties, she is a top pro, our best illegal. Her legend is impenetrable,” said Gorelikov, reading from the folder. “She has a position of influence—she is an editor at one of the top liberal magazines in Manhattan, widely known and respected in her profession. Her colleagues are totally unsuspecting. They have no idea they have been working beside an SVR officer all these years. It is perfect cover.

  “If necessary, you may initiate contact by calling SUSAN’s sterile number from your nonattributable cell phone, but only in an emergency. Conversely, if I want to send you a message via SUSAN, she in turn can trigger a meeting by calling you. Here are the numbers, recognition paroles, and meeting schedules. Simple, straightforward.” Dominika tried to palm the photo—Benford would sell his firstborn to get his hands on SUSAN—but Gorelikov took it back.

  “You’ll receive a full trip report,” said Dominika. After I brief Gable and Benford. With her SRAC transmitter damaged by the gopnik’s skull, Dominika would have to wait until she arrived in New York to rendezvous with her handlers and tell them these details.

  “I have every confidence in you,” said Gorelikov, looking at his watch, an elegant, wafer-thin Audemars Piguet Millenary Quadriennium with an openwork face, the intricate movement visible, like Gorelikov’s mind, minutely whirring, oscillating, and pendulating.

  * * *

  * * *

  New York, New York. It was a dream. Dominika—in French alias Sybille Clinard—flew from Paris to Toronto, then rode the slow Maple Leaf train down the scenic Hudson Valley, stirring the American gothic ghosts of Sleepy Hollow, and drowsy Dutchmen. Dominika had researched the city and was excited to see it all. On the train, US border agents didn’t look twice at her, and she had felt no fear. Pulling her suitcase across the concourse at Penn Station felt like home, but there were more people on the Moscow metro and the stations were grander. This rather grubby underground terminal couldn’t compare with the magnificent Kiyevskaya Station on the Arbat line, with its mosaics and chandeliers. There were shops and music here, a man with a hat was dancing for tips, and an old woman stopped and started dancing with him. Americans. Russians were more reserved, more serious, and they dressed up to go out in the city. These New Yorkers were half-naked. Dominika trudged up the stairs, pushed through the doors, came out onto the street, and stopped, frozen.

  The roar of the city enveloped her like a wave, the traffic on Seventh Avenue like a river in flood, the sun blotted out by the buildings—towering, majestic, glass canyons filling the sky in all directions, an impossible concentration of them, and their mass pressed down on her. Dominika craned her neck to look up at them like a derevenshchina, a hayseed from the country, not caring. To be sure, Moscow was a city, so too Paris, Rome, London, Athens, but nothing like this. This was someplace without equal, electric and buzzing, a polestar of humanity. Dominika was like a mouse inside a violin, claws gripping tight, stunned by noise and surrounded by vibration. She shook her head. She knew the name and address of her hotel, had memorized the walking route there, and she needed to find a secure telephone to call Bratok, but first she wanted to walk, to see everything. This great city was America, this energy, this industry, this overarching freedom. This is what she aspired to for Russia. This is why she was spying for CIA and this defined her nutro, the impossible-to-explain Russian concept of a person’s inner being.

  She threaded through pedestrians on the sidewalk, and as if to match the frenzy of these streets, unrelated thoughts came to her voley-nevoley, all in a rush. My God, how do you check for opposition coverage on these streets? Was the shashlik from these food trucks edible? Did they have gopniki, street toughs, in New York? It would be impossible to pick out surveillance in this crush of bobbing heads, faces of every color and every ethnicity, appraising eyes, twitching hands, and shuffling feet. Overhead a fog bank of peoples’ colors, indistinguishable, useless, was overwhelming. As Chief of Line KR counterintelligence, she knew how her colleagues in the New York rezidentura blithely reported managing operations on these streets—she’d reported it all to Benford for the last five years. But now, seeing it firsthand, she knew the truth. That’s why the Center uses illegals here for the really sensitive cases, she thought. Who could find surveillance in this woodwork?

  The Jane Hotel in the West Village was something out of a movie, chosen for her by Gorelikov for its small size and anonymity. An annoyingly voluble bellhop at the front desk had grinned at her (Russians reserve smiling for their friends and family members—to smile with no reason is a sign of a fool) and insisted on telling her that the hotel had been a sailor’s boardinghouse at the turn of the century, and that survivors of the Titanic in 1912 had recuperated here. Dominika thanked him, then ignored him. The lobby was high Victorian, a riot of colored mosaic pilasters and leafy palms in tarnished copper kettles. The bar/lounge was Bohemian crazy, filled with a thousand candles, velveteen upholstered couches, zebra-print armchairs, a brown-leather hippo, and a toffee-colored stuffed bighorn sheep with a cowbell around its neck, standing high atop the fireplace lintel. It would be fun to seduce Nate in this hideaway.

  Walking down the dim wainscoted corridor to her room she felt the shi
pwrecked spirits of 1912 around her. As she fumbled with her key card, an old woman in a woolen suit and matching pillbox hat came out of a room at the end of the corridor. Under the ridiculous hat her white hair was up in a bun, and she wore half-moon glasses. She shuffled soundlessly toward Dominika on the threadbare carpet, her right hand running along the wooden wall panels for balance. Dominika flattened against the wall to make space for the biddy to pass. Behind the glasses, the old woman’s eyes locked onto Dominika’s for a second; they were the color of amber. Hunter’s eyes, wolf’s eyes, raptor’s eyes. A strong blue aura around her head. Cunning, calculation, deception. What was the starukha, the old crone, looking at? She didn’t belong in this trendy hotel either. Dominika suddenly knew: They were watching her. This old woman was a bird dog to report that Dominika had arrived. The MAGNIT case was running on many different levels. The old lady slowly disappeared around a corner.

  Dominika’s room was train-compartment narrow, with a ship’s berth instead of a bed. She imagined making love with Nate in this little room, her foot braced on the far wall for purchase. She left her suitcase and purse on the bed, stuffed the EKHO phones, a small snap wallet with money, and her own mobile phone into a shoulder bag, which she zipped shut. She must not lose the phones to be delivered to SUSAN. The old lady in the hallway was a wake-up call: Dominika had no doubt that They would use her personal phone to track her movements as well as hot-wire it to listen to her conversations. Into the other coat pocket she clipped the fat ballpoint pen with pointed metal tip—a tactical fighting spike—that was her only weapon.