The Kremlin's Candidate

by Jason Matthews

  Walters looked over at DIVA, who, his chief had told him last night, was the absolute “gold standard,” so don’t make any mistakes, not one, because if he screwed this one through a tradecraft error, he’d be muscling a floor buffer in the Headquarters front lobby, making sure the Great Seal of CIA on the terrazzo marble was nice and shiny for when his replacement reported for duty. No pressure, mind you, and have fun out there.

  Walters didn’t know what to expect: a mousy librarian or a rotund administrator, but not this Venus driving the car, not the classic Hellenic profile, flower-petal lips, luminous chestnut hair piled on top of her head, concentrating on traffic, electric-blue eyes darting constantly between her mirrors. Her elegant hands held the steering wheel professionally at the ten-and-two position, and she moved through traffic aggressively, shifting smoothly out of the district, east onto the third ring road, weaving through the belching blue traffic, then suddenly off again at Lyusinovskaya Ulitsa south to the 390-hectare Kolomenskoye Park on the river. DIVA parked and they quickly walked through crowds of tourists—no one paid them any attention—past the bone-white Church of the Ascension and the fanciful seventeenth-century wooden palace of Tsar Aleksey, bristling with gables, onion domes, and bell towers. DIVA led Ricky down a steep wooded slope to a small streambed, mossy paths following the water, surrounded by thick woods. It was suddenly dark and cold—and utterly silent. A slight mist hung over the trickle of water, and Walters looked around for three hags stirring a bubbling witches’ cauldron. Ricky knew they could spend more than the requisite four minutes in this creepy wooded glen for the meeting. Good screening.

  “Pretty spooky down here,” said Walters, in English. He had no Russian. “We could probably find a couple of long-term cache sites somewhere along here.”

  “Golosov Ravine,” said DIVA, looking around. “It’s very famous to Muscovites. There are sacred stones, holy natural springs, and tales of phantoms appearing out of the fog. Thank you for coming. No problem getting clear?” This CIA boy looks smart, he’s calm, and handles himself well on the street. Not like Bratok but solid.

  Walters shook his head, unzipping his backpack, mentally reviewing his meeting agenda. “Thank you, Colonel, for all you’ve done,” said Walters. “I’m aware of only a fraction of your service, but enough to know what you contribute.” A charmer, like Nathaniel Nash, she thought. Same purple halo too. Passionate.

  “Call me Dominika,” she said. “Do you have my replacement equipment?” She saw his face fall. He told her quickly about the SRAC situation, and said that Simon Benford was working to get commo gear to her as soon as possible. In the meantime, Mr. Benford wanted her to have this. He held out a chunky sports watch inside a plastic bag, a precaution against metka.

  “Are you people serious?” she said, carefully dipping into the bag, extracting then fingering the watch. Walters hurried to explain.

  “Without SRAC, we’ll have to use personal meets—or dead drops—to pass intel and requirements. You know all the call-out signal sites, right?” Dominika nodded.

  “This is different. The watch is a beacon, for emergencies. It’s connected to something called the Cospas-SARSAT rescue system, which is a maritime rescue locator with a GPS capability,” said Walters. “The beacon frequency is encrypted and hops around. It looks like background noise to nearby receivers. No triangulation.”

  “Quite lovely, but what is its purpose?”

  Walters did not know about Dominika’s militant opposition regarding exfiltration. “An exfil trigger. If you activate the beacon, and we geolocate the signal in Moscow, we’ll check every day at 2100 hours at the downtown pickup site,” said Ricky, reading off a small tablet. “You remember it, the twin phones to the right of the Filevsky Park metro station entrance? It’s less than a kilometer from your current apartment.” Dominika nodded. “If we geolocate your beacon near Petersburg, we use Red Route Two. You know that site. If your beacon transmits from Cape Idokopas, which we have designated as the Black Sea exfil site, you wait on the beach for pickup.”

  “Exfiltration again? Another submarine?” asked Dominika, her voice suddenly edgy. She had once rescued a blown CIA agent by delivering him to a minisubmersible crewed by Navy SEALs in Neva Bay, near Petersburg.

  “No, there’s something different,” said Walters, sweating despite the dank air in the ravine. He swiped at the tablet. “A manned minisubmarine takes time to deploy, and is slow. We have something new that’s always ready, and very fast. You will be taken off the beach in a USV, an unmanned surface vessel.” He showed her streaming images of a low-slung, fifty-foot, flush-deck speedboat painted gray overall, with wavy patterns of white and black camouflage. Dominika looked at Walters.

  “You are telling me this boat has no one driving? There is no crew?” Ricky swallowed hard. Gable had warned him that DIVA could quickly get in a “horn tossin’ mood.”

  “It is precisely computer controlled, steered by satellite, undetectable on radar, can loiter indefinitely, and is always available,” said Walters. “With this platform, maritime exfiltration from Putin’s Palace on the Black Sea becomes a viable option.”

  “I will only be at the cape during the president’s four-day reception this fall in November, so it is not a viable site,” she said. “Besides, Gospodin Benford knows my attitude regarding fleeing and defecting. Didn’t he mention it to you?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” said Walters, trying to keep this together. Agent handling. More like playing a snake charmer’s pungi flute in front of a swaying cobra. He hurriedly dug into his backpack for another plastic envelope. “You wait on the shore, night or day, and you wear these infrared sunglasses so you’ll see the USV’s IR strobe two klicks out to sea. Just stand there and it’ll home in to the wristwatch. The thing’ll beach itself, glide up to you without a sound, like a horse nuzzling for a sugar cube. You climb up the toeholds on the stern, open the deck hatch and get in; watch your head, it’s tight. There’s a recliner-like chair, a seat belt, headphones, food and drink, heat control. Close the hatch, and the USV will do the rest.” He showed her more images.

  “Where is this thing supposed to take me?”

  “At fifty knots you’ll be twenty miles offshore at the pickup point with a gray hull in twenty-four minutes,” said Walters, proudly.

  “Where you gentlemen will greet me aboard the navy ship, and we watch at the rail as we sail away and my Rodina sinks below the horizon forever,” said Dominika, dully. “And I will have effectively deserted my country.” Pissed-off agent. Walters couldn’t remember this precise situation coming up during role-playing exercises at the Farm.

  He searched for the right words. “It’s an exfil plan, Colonel . . . I mean Dominika. In case of hot pursuit, to get you to safety.” She shook her head, finished with arguing, and handed Walters the thermos bottle. Walters wiped the thermos to get rid of DIVA’s prints.

  “There are six single-spaced, double-sided printed sheets inside the shell. If you smash it to break—”

  “—I know the thermos trick.” Walters smiled. “What more?”

  “Please tell Gospodin Benford I will be in Vienna in ten days to meet with my North Korean. I will call to confirm my hotel, but we have used the König von Ungarn, on Schulerstrasse, behind St. Stephen’s previously. Please tell him I believe Professor Ri will accept the introduction of an additional debriefer. We have done it before, with Mr. Nash impersonating a Russian officer, thanks to his Russian language. In this case, it would be easier, as our meetings are conducted in English. CIA can service your own North Korean requirements without risk.” Walters nodded.

  “If you handle him in English, then any nuke analyst can—”

  “—I would prefer the officer be Nathaniel Nash,” interrupted Dominika. “We have worked together for years and operate compatibly.” Walters thumbed DIVA’s request—demand—into his tablet, not knowing the phrase “operate compatibly” would result in knowing glances at Headquarters, for he was un
aware of the forbidden relationship. The woman was something.

  “I’ll pass the word,” said Ricky. Dominika’s face darkened, and her voice became low and serious.

  “Also, please tell him that I can confirm that President Putin approved the assassination of dissident Daria Repina in New York City.”

  “That created a panic in Washington,” said Walters. “It was all over the papers. Who did it?”

  “Never mind his name. I know who is responsible, and I will deal with him,” said Dominika.

  “I’ll tell them,” said Ricky. This Amazon is serious. Look at that face. “I suppose I should say, for the record, that you should not try any dangerous or risky action against the assassin. You’re too valuable and—”

  “—and a frail woman?” said Dominika. Walters held up his hands in armistice. His tablet, a second-generation TALON device, was recording their conversation, standard procedure for restricted-handling cases. When they play it back, I should get a medal if I get through this meeting without DIVA punching me in the face.

  “That’s not it at all,” said Ricky, thinking furiously for the correct word. “I just meant you’re too precious to us.” Precious. Fortuitous word.

  DIVA’s face softened. “I do not mean to snap at you,” she said in apology, then became serious again. “Next item: I have written details of a GRU covert action in Turkey. They propose to supply weapons and explosives to Kurdish separatists in Istanbul. Despite objection from the intelligence services, President Putin last night approved the operation. I have included all the details.”

  “So much intel. Your reports will go out tonight,” said Walters, stowing the thermos in his backpack.

  “One last thing. Are you aware of the situation with someone called MAGNIT?” said Dominika. She knew Benford’s penchant for compartmentation, and did not want to say too much. Walters nodded.

  “Simon Benford briefed me by secure phone when they tapped me to meet you. I know the general facts, as much as any of us knows.”

  “I’ve reported all I have heard,” said Dominika, “but please emphasize to Benford that MAGNIT is being looked at for an unspecified job in the administration. The Kremlin is very excited. I still do not know MAGNIT’s identity.”

  “This will create a storm in Headquarters,” said Ricky.

  “It will create more than a storm if MAGNIT begins reading my intelligence reports in his new position, and begins feeding them to Moscow,” said Dominika. Ricky for the first time in his young career saw and appreciated the icy danger this woman—all agents—live with every day, and marveled at the courage required to keep operating.

  He checked the elapsed-time counter on the tablet. “Fifteen minutes, I should get going,” he said, remembering a last item. “Mr. Benford wanted me to ask you for confirmation—when you can—on who was behind the death of our late Director Alex Larson. He’s obsessed with finding out.”

  Dominika looked at her shoes. “Please tell Simon only the president could have given the order. I suspect Anton Gorelikov would be entrusted to design such a plan. I will confirm when I can.”

  Walters nodded. “You’ll be talking to Nash in ten days.” Dominika could not shake his hand; she had heard that the FSB had absolutely stopped deploying metka when its use against Western diplomats became an embarrassing international story in the heady years of glastnost, but CIA continued the prophylactic protocol nonetheless. “You trust Putin wouldn’t ever start spritzing our asses again?” Gable had snorted. When they saw each other in Vienna, she would ask Nate about any results from using spy dust on SUSAN.

  Her Nate. As mad as she had been at him in Athens, she missed him and yearned to see him.

  She smiled at him. “You know your way back? Take care with the thermos. And thank you for the watch and glasses.”

  Walters shrugged on his backpack. “Stay safe, Dominika,” he said. “I’ll come out anytime, anyplace, if you need me. I’ll be checking the signal sites every day.” He turned and disappeared around a bend in the streambed, stirring the ground fog as he moved. Let one of the seventeenth-century Tartar ghosts living in the mossy Golosov Ravine speed you safely home, Dominika thought.

  * * *

  * * *

  Benford raved in his office, prompting Dotty, his secretary of eight years, to shake her head in warning at various CID officers who wished to speak with the Chief this morning. “Best not; perhaps this afternoon” was the whispered refrain.

  Dominika’s newest tidbit about MAGNIT’s being looked at by the president for a big job should have made sorting the possibles easier, but he needed a name. Benford already suspected and feared the worst: the senior vacancy that the Kremlin was steering MAGNIT toward was the one the Russians themselves had created by killing his friend Alex Larson—DCIA. He knew he was looking for a senior figure who, sometime in the last decade, had known enough about the US Navy railgun to have reported technical details to the Russians. The scores of witting navy personnel—officers, enlisted, scientists, and civilian contractors—could now in theory be whittled down, as none of them was likely to be tapped by the president. Or was it someone they had not thought of? Of the dozen high-ranking bureaucrats, only the current secretary of the Department of Energy had occasionally been briefed on the railgun, but he had spent years in other departments on other projects. According to Dominika, MAGNIT had been an active reporting source for a decade. An anomaly. Could she have misreported the facts? More ominous, could that slick bastard Anton Gorelikov be parceling variants of the same story to different people—called a barium enema in the Game—as a loyalty test to see which variant later surfaced to finger the traitor?

  In London, MI6 called the barium trap a blue-dye test, describing the same mole-catching principle metaphorically as pouring blue dye down a pipe to observe from which downstream outlet the dye would eventually issue. At a counterintelligence liaison conference in London several years earlier, Benford had declared the British terminology idiotic, pointing out that pipes—especially the decrepit plumbing in the United Kingdom and Europe—became clogged, or they broke underground, and that the metaphor of a barium enema was more to his liking. “That, Simon, is because you are an uphill gardener,” said C, the Chief of Six, which slang Benford did not understand, and no one told him it meant sodomite. Thank God for the special relationship, breathed the Brits in the room.

  Gable and Forsyth met Benford in the Executive Dining Room at Langley for lunch, where they tossed around ideas and theories. The elegant room—as narrow as the dining car on a train—on the executive seventh floor of Headquarters, overlooking the tree-lined Potomac River, featured tables placed closely together, so that new arrivals were forced to walk between them, nodding to friends or cutting enemies. Everyone saw everyone else, and with whom they were lunching, and the cabals and cliques and gangs among the seniors at Langley were therefore common knowledge. Benford ordered a plate of pasta with anchovies, parsley, pangrattato, and lemon, while Forsyth chose the crab bisque, and Gable, the grilled shrimp.

  “This alarms me,” said Benford, slurping pasta. “A Russian mole could wind up in the Cabinet room.”

  Gable stabbed a shrimp. “What I don’t get is that Domi says the fucker’s been working for a decade,” he said. “That means his previous job was of interest to the Ruskies.”

  “I’m worried it’s a trap, a test before Putin gives her the SVR job,” said Forsyth. “Christ, we vet our directors before putting them forward. So might the Kremlin.”

  The chief of the Office of Congressional Affairs, Eric Duchin, a galloping careerist, busybody, and gossip, arrived with a posse of his toadeaters, making their way between tables, stopping to greet fellow division chiefs amid great laughter and guffaws. Duchin stopped at Benford’s table, surrounded by his grinning acolytes, who were known as “the Duchebags” on the ops floors. Duchin had a Gumby-square head, thick snow-white hair, and a narrow face. Students at the Farm had nicknamed him Q-Tip.

  “Simon,” he sai
d, nodding.

  “Eric,” said Benford. Silence. Gable fingered the skewer that his shrimp had been served on.

  “I’m calling a meeting on Friday,” said Duchin, finally. “SSCI, the Senate Select Committee, wants CIA to provide courtesy briefings to the possible nominees for the Director’s job. Just a heads-up to prepare. The committee wants all nominees to be able to discuss current operations during closed hearings, including your Russian antics.”

  Benford put down his fork, choosing to ignore the word “antics.” “Am I given to understand that operational briefings are to be provided to multiple individuals, only one of whom will eventually be confirmed as CIA Director? It is customary to provide a limited briefing to the final nominee, and only to the final nominee.”

  Duchin shrugged. “Your precious secrets will be safe with them,” he said. “I’ll send you their bio packets. All currently hold SI/TK (Special Intelligence/Talent Keyhole), top-secret clearances, including Special Access Program tickets. Besides, the Director wants it done this way. Greater transparency.” After Alex Larson’s drowning, an acting Director had been appointed, whom the obsequious Duchin was already calling “Director.”

  Benford bristled. “Greater transparency? In an intelligence service?” he snapped. “Duchin, you are incapable of sentient thought. You are my natural enemy. Go away.”

  Duchin shrugged. “Take it up with the Director,” he said. “He’s committed to a smooth transition. See you Friday.” The three sat silently at the table, thinking of a pair of electric-blue eyes alone in the Kremlin, flitting across the slack, beefy faces around the table, any one of whom would pull the trigger on her without hesitation. These nominees’ briefings necessarily would include, at the least, a mention of a CIA-run penetration of the SVR, and at worst, DIVA’s true name. Heresy.