The Kremlin's Candidate

by Jason Matthews

  Dominika was taller by a head, but Blokhin’s body was thick, no, dense, like stone. From behind there was a small bald spot visible through his thinning hair, but he combed his hair to cover as much of it as he could. They were walking on one of the avenues, moving through the crush of pedestrians, when a lanky street person blocked their path, calling Dominika “honey,” and asking for a dollar. Dominika had seen this several times before and knew there was no danger but Blokhin, perhaps not understanding—he had told Dominika he spoke no English—in a gliding step put his forearm across the beggar’s chest and swept him aside as if walking through a field of ripe wheat. The beggar caught himself, and took a step back toward Blokhin, but the irresistible force of the shove transmitted some jungle warning to avoid confrontation with this cat, and he let them go, shouting obscenities as they walked away.

  “You show restraint on the street,” barked Dominika to Blokhin in Russian. “We are here in undocumented alias. Back in Moscow you can kill whomever you want. But not here, not when you’re with me.” Blokhin looked at Dominika as if deciding whether to bite, then looked past her and said obozhdat, wait, and pulled open the door to a bookstore, and went in, Dominika on his heels. The store was enormous, with three floors of books on shelves and tables and people reading in overstuffed chairs, the air laced with the aroma of brewed coffee from a café on the second level. Dominika watched Blokhin scan a store directory, squinting like a Visigoth reading a milepost on the road to Rome, until he walked to the fiction section and found Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which he looked at closely, riffling the pages.

  “You have no English,” said Dominika. “How can you read it?” Blokhin looked at her blankly. “There are editions in the original Russian you could read instead,” she said.

  “I want to learn English. I will teach myself,” he said, as casually as if he had declared “I will learn to bake bread.”

  Blokhin’s black bat wings spread, then folded. He was lying about something, she decided; perhaps he read English. “Why this book?” said Dominika. It was quite amazing, this squat commando gripping the paperback like a pistol, determined to start reading.

  “I have been told about this work. It is a great Russian novel.” Told by whom? Sitting around the Spetsnaz squad room honing bayonets, discussing Dostoyevsky? “It is about permissible murder in pursuit of a higher purpose,” said Blokhin with surprising lucidity. Something you would feel at home with, no doubt, thought Dominika. She left him gazing at the books, left the bookstore, walked to a shoe store three doors down, and began looking at strappy sandals on display. She meant to conduct a little street test: How would Blokhin react when he looked up from his books to find Dominika gone? Was he here in New York to keep tabs on her?

  “Do you like this style?” asked Blokhin, suddenly behind her, making her jump. He was slipping a pair of sunglasses into his jacket pocket, and he took the sandal from her and inspected it, rubbing his dill-pickle fingers over the leather. How had he found her so quickly with hundreds of shops fifty meters from the bookstore? She’d have to double-check her status before meeting Gable tonight. Sergeant Blokhin was someone with secret skills, and not just cutting throats. A copy of his novel was in a small plastic bag.

  Blokhin then declared himself hungry and insisted they go into a Korean restaurant for barbecued ribs, which he had consumed in great quantities during past joint-commando exercises in North Korea. Blokhin inhaled the gleaming ribs accompanied by mounds of vermillion kimchi, green onion and cucumber salad, and ssamjang, a spicy paste smeared on accompanying lettuce leaves.

  Blowing garlic like a contented whale, Blokhin next dived into a sprawling sporting-goods store and spent an hour looking at wire saws, camp hatchets, machetes, and survival knives. His eyes said everything: he expertly appraised each item as a weapon, a killing instrument. “This is an ingenious tool,” said Blokhin, running the teeth of a wire saw lightly over his fingertips. “Loop this over a branch, pull it back and forth with these handles, and it cuts wood like a regular pila, a saw.” Ingenious indeed, thought Dominika. A throat would cut easier than a pine bough.

  “You won’t be allowed on the plane with any of this stuff,” Dominika told him in Russian. “Cable the rezidentura to pouch one back for you, or two: one for Major Shlykov as well. I’m sure his trees need pruning too.” Blokhin ignored the comment and put the saw down. Dominika wanted to create just enough enmity between them so that she could feign mounting dislike and impatience, and leave the Repina reception early to rendezvous with Gable.

  “It would be wise not to make an enemy of the major,” said Blokhin softly, several minutes later, back out on the street.

  “Why is that?” said Dominika.

  “Because then you would become my enemy,” he said, the tips of his black airfoils extending slightly behind his head, like a cobra flaring his neck hood in threat display.

  * * *

  * * *

  The Grand Ballroom of the Hilton was a colossal space, lighted by chandeliers and triple-gilded lanterns in recessed circular alcoves high on the walls. A crowd of a thousand people filled row upon row of chairs lined up almost to the back of the room. Loggia levels on either side had been reserved for press; television cameras on tripods bristled and television lights bathed the raised stage, framed with a royal purple velour border and leg curtains. A solitary lecturn and microphone stood center stage. Blokhin wanted to sit in the front row to listen to Repina’s presentation, but Dominika refused, preferring instead an aisle seat halfway back, near the exit doors. Blokhin argued that closer was better until Dominika sat down where she wanted, and refused to budge.

  “The seats up close will be in sight of those cameras. You wish to be on the evening news?” Blokhin did not respond but sat down next to her.

  The ballroom was abuzz and raucous. Different groups of supporters waved signs printed with FREEDOM FOR RUSSIA, and PUTIN MURDERER, and OUT OF FREE UKRAINE. A number of other placards were printed in Cyrillic. Blokhin nudged Dominika to look at one of these that said HANG PUTIN BY THE NECK. Blokhin’s face had taken on a sleepy-eyed languor that, had she known the Spetsnaz sergeant better, would have telegraphed his building rage.

  An official came onto the stage, spoke about donating funds to Daria Repina’s Free Russia Movement, then began a lengthy introduction, which was briefly interrupted by a knot of young students waving little Russian flags and chanting “Repina, poshël ty,” which loosely translated meant “Repina, fuck off.” Blokhin and Dominika exchanged glances. They knew these pro-Russia agitators were one of the tentacles of the Kremlin’s active-measures octopus, a global machine designed to perpetually sow discord, drive wedges, and influence opinion. Tomorrow it might be dezinformatsiya, disinformation in a respected US or international paper; the day after, a forged document that would inflame the Arab street against socialist Europe or pit member EU states against one another; and the day after that, political sabotage to fuel a coup in Montenegro to destabilize the Balkans. Active measures were an unceasing staple of the Kremlin’s foreign policy, and had been since the Bolsheviks annihilated White Russian exiles hiding in Europe in the 1920s.

  A brief scuffle between agitators and supporters broke out, chairs were overturned, and hotel security bustled the pro-Russia hotheads out of the ballroom. As their departing chants died away, the lights dimmed, a spot focused on the podium, and Daria Repina walked onstage to thunderous applause. She was tall and gaunt, with short brown hair in a tight pixie cut that fell in bangs to one side of her face. Her face was severe, lined by the strain of opposing, campaigning against, and exposing the crimes and corruption of the Putin regime for close to a decade. She had begun her jihad against Vladimir Vladimirovich as a little-known journalist, and was muzzled, shoved, and fined by the police for her misdemeanors. The world began noticing when Repina began touring Europe and the United Kingdom, raising awareness during impassioned rallies—the famous speech at Royal Albert Hall in London marked a turning poi
nt—and the Free Russia Movement was born. After two months in the United States, serious money started pouring in, and Repina became the face of dissident Russia.

  Coy interviewers frequently asked her if she feared for her life. After all, Daria had been preceded by prominent journalists, disloyal government officials, and opposition party luminaries, all of whom were now gone: Nemtsov, Berezovsky, Politkovskaya, Khlebnikov, Litvinenko, Estemirova, Lesin. Shot, poisoned, or fed Polonium-210, they all had been eliminated as threats to the president’s sole priority as head of state: to preserve his kleptocracy. Daria would invariably reply that Putin’s time was running out, because what he feared most—Russian citizens demonstrating in Red Square—was an inevitability. The eyes of the world were on her now; she was inviolate.

  Repina started speaking. Her mannish voice was electric, her passion and energy flowed into the ruby-red halo that shone about her head and shoulders, proclaiming passion, courage, and her love for the Rodina and for the people of Russia, once serfs, then inmates in a Soviet Union without windows, and now, impossibly, serfs again, crying out to the West to understand, to help them be free.

  When Repina came out from behind the lecturn with the microphone in her hand like a rock star, and railed against the corruption, and the plunder, and the assassinations, and the wars, and the unholy alliances that had to end, the audience came out of their seats and cheered. Dominika kept her face impassive, but inwardly she was amazed to hear a Russian speak the truth, and give voice to her own indignant rage that had pushed her to CIA and a mortally dangerous life as a spy. She, Dominika, was working in the shadows, underground, while Repina was standing on the ramparts, in full sight. Her heart raced; this was an epiphany: she wasn’t alone; her countrymen were with her.

  Blokhin was still in his seat, chin slightly raised, eyes locked on Repina.

  * * *

  * * *

  “I cannot listen to any more of this kramola, this sedition,” said Dominika, getting up, faking impatience. “I’m going to my hotel to sleep. I have an early flight.” Blokhin didn’t move, but kept staring at the tall crusader in the spotlight, who was walking back and forth along the length of the stage, now excoriating the siloviki, the remora attached to the belly of the great white shark, feeding off the tendrils of meat dribbling out of the apex predator’s jaws. “Don’t start any trouble tonight,” she hissed, but he ignored her. Dominika paused at the door to watch Repina onstage, thinking she’d like to meet this charismatic woman someday. Perhaps Benford could arrange it. Then she pushed through the door, late for her rendezvous with Gable (she planned to tease him about her being tormented all day by memories of his kiss, to watch him squirm). A last look at Blokhin, whose black wings were unfolded over his head like a raptor about to take flight.

  Repina’s presentation had concluded, and she was surrounded onstage by press reporters, admirers, and even people asking for autographs. Blokhin was standing quietly at the fringe of the hangers-on, smiling pleasantly and applauding with the rest of the crowd. It took an hour before Repina and her assistant, Magda, a scruffy young Muscovite activist, were free to go to their room on the sixth floor of the hotel (paid for by the City of New York). They were escorted by two officers of the NYPD, Sergeants Moran and Baumann, veterans of the force—Baumann had served on NYPD SWAT for six years before blowing out a knee during an assault and returning to regular duty. Both men had volunteered for this light protective detail because they needed the overtime; this gig qualified as premium double overtime, and there wasn’t any heavy lifting, basically just sitting on a hotel couch watching TV, eating chips, and drinking Coke. Going to the rallies was a pain, but no one was going to mess with Repina in New York City. Both sergeants were in civvies—they wore tweed sports coats over white shirts with Glock 19s in belt holsters on their right hips. Blokhin’s practiced eye saw the slight bulges of the 9mm pistols through the cops’ coats—called “printing” in concealed-carry circles, but not normally a concern to uniformed cops.

  Blokhin just caught the elevator with the four of them, apologetically skipping through the closing doors and nodding courteously to them as he moved to the back of the car. Magda was chatting with Baumann, while Repina stared at Blokhin, her Russian nose sensing something familiar about him, his face, his clothes, the pheromones coming off him.

  “Na kakom etazhe vy khotite?” asked Repina quickly in Russian, What floor do you want? Blokhin blinked at her, and in slightly accented British English said, “Excuse me, I’m afraid I don’t speak Polish.” Repina smiled back and asked, “What floor?” Blokhin said, “Five please,” having seen that Sergeant Moran, unmindful of one of the basic techniques of tradecraft, had already pushed the sixth-floor button, thus revealing their destination. Repina stared at Blokhin all the way up, and shrugged as he stepped out on the fifth floor with another nod and a muttered “good evening.” The two sergeants watched Scarface Blokhin walk down the hall as the doors eased shut.

  “Most popular in his class,” muttered Moran to Baumann, who nodded. Repina and Magda didn’t get the joke.

  In the fifth-floor alcove, Blokhin peeked out, scanned the ceiling, and identified the black fish-eye lenses of the security cameras, one at each end of the corridor. They could not see him in the elevator alcove. He slipped a light full-face neoprene balaclava over his head, pushed through the stairwell fire doors, and ran up one flight. Repina’s group was just entering a room halfway down the hallway, and Blokhin waited for them to get inside and close the door. He waited another five minutes, subconsciously flexing his shoulders and loosening his wrists. He walked up to the room, took a cleansing breath, and knocked lightly, as hotel staff or a chambermaid would knock. He dragged the hood off his head and kept his head down.

  If Iosip Blokhin had been wired to monitors at that moment, his heart rate would have registered 50bpm, blood pressure, 110/70, and ventilation rate, 12 breaths a minute. His galvanic skin response, an indication of stress measured in microsiemens, was at “resting” levels. He recognized the calm clarity that always came before combat, the sudden acuity in vision, and the sharpening of both his sense of smell and hearing. He savored the icy edge of immediate action and the gummy relish of imminent killing. He could hear muffled footfalls on the carpet coming closer. The peephole darkened a second, then came the rasp of the dead bolt moving past the strike plate as the door opened.

  Blokhin hit the door with his right shoulder, snapping the security chain and hitting Officer Baumann in the forehead with the edge of the door, and he fell back hitting the wall with his head, trying to get on his feet, but Blokhin closed like a leopard on a baboon, and hit him in the throat with a web-hand strike, compressing his trachea, and sending the cop gasping to the floor, where Blokhin stomped on his Adam’s apple, totally crushing his windpipe. Blokhin rolled the strangling cop butt-high to fish out the Glock from his holster; extracted the fifteen-round magazine to check it; then racked the slide as he walked into the sitting room of the minisuite, picking up a bright throw pillow from an armchair and stepping up to Sergeant Moran, who was lying on the couch in his stocking feet watching a baseball game.

  “Who was at the door?” said Moran, not looking away from the TV, as Blokhin shot him from a meter away through the pillow four times in the temple, cheek, and jaw, then turned to an openmouthed Magda sitting at the desk and shot her six times through the now-shredded pillow into her gaping mouth, forehead, and throat, knocking her backward in her chair to the floor amid a welter of pillow stuffing and fabric, floating bits of which settled on and stuck to her bloody cheek. Eleven seconds had elapsed since Blokhin knocked on the door.

  Daria Repina walked barefoot into the sitting room in a cloud of steam from the bathroom, wrapped in a hotel bathrobe too big for her, toweling her pixie hair. She stopped short, seeing Blokhin in the room, the queer bloke in the elevator, and her natural combativeness took over. She asked him what he was doing in her suite, and to get the hell out, and who the fuck did he think he
was? Blokhin faced her, and quietly said, “Tolko choromu I ne vezot,” Only the black cat, and no luck. Mother of God, thought Repina, only then noticing one of Magda’s bare feet sticking up in the air over the upturned chair, and the blood-smeared face of one of the policemen on the sodden couch, and she knew this man was from Moscow sent by Putin, and she ran to the bedroom, turned to slam the bedroom door and get to the phone, but Blokhin threw her on the bed and hit her massively four times with a knife-hand Spetsnaz Cross: a strike to the right side of her neck, crushing the brachial plexus between the collarbone and the first rib, then across backhand to strike the lower left rib cage, staving in the seventh and eighth ribs, which pierced the lower lobe of her left lung, then up across to the left side of the neck, and back down to fracture the right rib cage, puncturing the right lung, each time forcing a grunt out of Repina, now barely conscious. Her body shook as Blokhin sat her up and wrapped his lobster-claw hands on her chin and slowly twisted her head first one way then the other, listening to the green-stick snap as the C2, C3, and C4 cervical vertebrae separated. Repina flopped back on the mattress, staring sightlessly at Putin’s henchman. Elapsed time: seventeen seconds.

  Blokhin had been instructed to destroy the target with maximum unizhenive, maximum humiliation. Moscow wanted Repina to be found in the morning, reduced to a savaged pile of flesh, a demonstration of Russian wrath and a warning to others who dared follow her example. He roughly stripped the bathrobe off her corpse—her skinny body already was a lurid mass of hematomas—and dragged her by one ankle off the bed, her head thumping onto the floor, into the living room, broken neck wobbling, into the middle of the carpet, wrists crossed above her head, and legs kicked out wide, genitals cruelly exposed. He left the other bodies where they were in mute testament to the Kremlin’s wrath. Blokhin scratched a B on Repina’s stomach with the minibar corkscrew (the Cyrillic V for Vympel group of Spetsnaz) for investigators to puzzle over. He did not interfere with either of the women; the massacre tableau was enough, and he took a panoramic photo of the room with his cell phone. Total elapsed time: three minutes. Only the black cat, and no luck.