The Kremlin's Candidate

by Jason Matthews

  Bunny Boiler

  Nate and Bunty Boothby had agreed to meet that evening at The Bar in the Peninsula Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui for a get-acquainted drink, after which Bunty’s girlfriend, Marigold Dougherty, would join them for dinner at Felix, the ultrahip restaurant on the hotel’s twenty-eighth floor. Marigold was a reports officer in the ASIS station, had lived in Hong Kong for five years, and knew the city exceedingly well. Nate needed to turbocharge his area knowledge, and hoped both Australians would help him learn the city quickly.

  Nate had warmed instantly to Boothby during their initial meeting in the Australian Consulate. Bunty was short and blocky, with a broad face and gray eyes. He had the wide shoulders of a swimmer and the sun-bleached, perpetually unruly blond hair of the inveterate surfer. He had been drafted into ASIS immediately after graduating from the University of Melbourne and, thanks to his passion for riding monster waves, operated for his first three years with the quite remarkable cover of “surfie,” a globe-trotting beach boy looking for the perfect point break. He was one of the first foreigners to surf the infamous Silver Dragon, the thundering eight-meter tall, full-moon-triggered tidal bore on the Qiantang River near Shanghai, for a record fifty-two minutes, sluicing and cutting across the chocolate-brown wave on his Twin Fin short board for seventeen kilometers. The next day, the inconspicuous, twenty-three-year-old surfer dude in board shorts and flip-flops reestablished contact with a clandestine ASIS reporting source—a colonel in the 61398 bùdui, the shady PLA cyberwarfare unit in Shanghai—with whom contact had been lost, a screamingly risky operational act considering that the long-haired young man had no diplomatic immunity in China.

  Bunty was laconic, irreverent, and ingenuous, every bit the informal, loose-limbed Aussie, a wry observer of the “tossers, wankers, and ratbags” who roamed the Earth and, occasionally, sullied his beloved service. But Nate quickly saw that Bunty’s playing the huffy rustic was camouflage for an operations officer with a shrewd eye and a killer instinct for recruiting human intelligence sources. Now a ten-year veteran, Bunty had traded his puka-shell necklace for a necktie and two-button suit, but he was still a larrikin, a wild child.

  The bar at the Peninsula Hotel was all dark wood, polished brass, and sparkling glassware. They sat in two deep leather chesterfield armchairs in the corner of the bar, and on Bunty’s recommendation ordered two signature Rolls-Royce cocktails. Nate leaned back in his chair.

  “Two days ago, I walked for six hours,” said Nate. “At the end of the day, I couldn’t tell you whether I had surveillance or not.” Bunty sipped his drink, looking at him over the rim of his glass.

  “Welcome to Honkers,” said Bunty, his voice low. “Your Moscow rules are about as useful in this city as an ashtray on a motorcycle. Too many locals, too much movement. We don’t think the MSS surveil us with any regularity. They have cameras everywhere, and static watchers, and co-opted informers, but they’re patient bastards who’re willing to wait. If they think something serious is going on, they can deploy a big team to bail a target up.” Nate held up his hand.

  “What do you mean ‘bail a target’?” said Nate.

  Bunty took another sip of his drink. “Sorry,” he said. “Australian slang; it’s an affliction—use it without thinking, so stop me when I say something unintelligible.”

  “And bail somebody up?”

  “Wrap them up, control movement, physically impede,” said Bunty.

  “Thank you. So how are we getting to Macao without the MSS bailing us up?” said Nate.

  Bunty smiled. “We’ll keep our eyes open, of course, but the hydrofoil and both sea terminals are covered, so we start cleaning ourselves when we step foot on land in Macao.”

  “And then what?”

  “Our guy will bring the general to Hac Sa Beach, on the south end of the island,” said Bunty. “There’s a secluded little Portuguese restaurant right on the water, Fernando’s, where you can have a quiet dinner meeting—try the red honeyed chicken, by the way. I’ll be at another table across the room, just in case. It’s just the two of us, and we’re on our own.”

  “How do you think the general will react?” said Nate.

  “She’ll be right,” said Bunty. “I mean, it will go fine. My canary has been talking to the general for months, softening him up. He’s scared and desperate, and he begged for help in replacing the official funds he lost. My guy told him he knew a Russian official who could get him out of his jam, and the general believes the Russians will keep it quiet. Our general’s quite the drongo—that’s ‘idiot’ in Australian; he’s expecting an offer. If you can sell that you’re a Rus—” Bunty suddenly stopped talking and got out of his armchair.

  A woman entered the bar, and nodded to the barman who snapped to attention. She stopped briefly at a table to greet a Western couple, obviously tourists. She then walked over to their table and shook Bunty’s hand, smiling faintly. She turned to Nate and nodded while Bunty introduced her as Grace Gao, assistant general manager of the Peninsula Hotel. With studied indifference, she categorized Nate in the manner of all hoteliers, assessing in three seconds his financial, social, and professional status. She didn’t blink.

  Nate’s case-officer instincts quivered like a spider on a hot rock. Grace Gao was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. She had a high forehead and straight brows over almond-shaped brown eyes. Her black hair was done in a braided bun at the back of her head, tendrils falling loose on both sides. Morning-after cheekbones framed the oval face and a chiseled mannish chin. An incongruous straight nose, a Roman nose with a slight bump, accentuated her most remarkable facial feature: a china-cup mouth with pink lips. She was Chinese, to be sure, but with the long-ago blood of a Portuguese sailor or a Dutch trader in her veins, that Eurasian hint of cardamom and cloves.

  Behind the beauty, but not because of it, her face radiated diffidence, impatience, disdain. She chatted easily with Bunty, ignoring Nate. She was short and thin, dressed in a black skirt and soft black jacket with wide lapels, over a stretchy black camisole that did more than hint at a prodigious figure more commonly encountered in Manhattan or Malibu. She wore expensive black pointy-toed pumps. Nate noticed that blue ropey veins showed through the skin on top of her hands and slim feet, suggesting frequent physical activity and cracking good health. She shook Bunty’s hand, ignored Nate again, turned, and walked out of the bar displaying tennis-ball calves that pulsed as she walked. Another woman has legs like that, ballerina’s calves, Nate thought, feeling a stab of guilty longing. Bunty sat down, tilted his head back to finish his drink, and looked at Nate.

  “Welcome to the club, mate,” said Bunty.

  “What club?” said Nate.

  “The Grace Gao fan club,” said Bunty. “Half the expats in Honkers want to snorkel in Lake Gao, and several billionaires from Singapore and Shanghai have offered her the moon. As far as I know, no one’s gotten into the garden, much less through the front door. She works sixteen-hour days at the hotel, then goes home to a little unit in Grenville House on Magazine Gap Road—incidentally not far from where you are.”

  “How do you know where she lives?” said Nate. Bunty’s face was deadpan.

  “Out of curiosity I did a little checking on her.”

  “Curiosity?”

  “Her only hobby is yoga; you can see how fit she is. She studies with some ancient crust of bread in Kowloon, and occasionally gives private lessons for guests at the hotel. She apparently is quite good; a level-three yogini, whatever that means.”

  “And no men in her life, at all?” asked Nate.

  “Mate, every man in the room cracks a fat when she walks in the door, but she’s unapproachable,” said Bunty.

  “If I guessed that ‘crack a fat’ means ‘get an erection’ would I be far off?” Bunty checked his watch.

  “For a Yank, you learn fast. Just don’t tell Marigold.”

  * * *

  * * *

  They walked through the Peninsula shopping arcade, past wi
ndows filled with cashmere, leather, and gold, to the private elevator to Felix Restaurant. The interior walls of the elevator were covered in dark wood panels carved in fantastic undulating ridges. As the elevator rose to the twenty-eighth floor, the normal lights dimmed as spots of blue, purple, and red slowly came on, as if they had ascended into an inky mesosphere. The doors opened onto a narrow corridor also dimly lighted with colored lights and they walked into the restaurant, a soaring room with massive anthracite columns, luminous Lucite stairways to upstairs bar levels, and floor-to-ceiling windows with a magnificent view of Victoria Harbour, the ziggurats and obelisks of Hong Kong Island ablaze, the reflection of a million lights shimmering on the dark waters of the harbor.

  Marigold Dougherty was sitting at a table near the window and waved to attract their attention. She was about thirty years old, short and slight with a mass of shoulder-length blond hair in ringlets, bushy blond eyebrows, and square-framed hipster eyeglasses. Also a former surfer, she was irreverent and sassy, with an infectious laugh that showed straight white teeth. She shook Nate’s hand firmly and pointed to the chairs at their table.

  “Whose face do you want to lean on?” said Marigold. The tubular steel chairs in the restaurant all were covered in white fabric, and on every chair back was the silk-screened likeness of a smiling Peninsula employee, including the face of the acclaimed chef of Felix. Nate laughed.

  “Is there a chair with Grace Gao’s face on it?” said Bunty. “That’s the one Nate wants.”

  Marigold turned toward him. “Oh no, Nate,” she said. “Don’t tell me you, too.”

  Nate shrugged. “We just met her in the bar, but Bunty’s confusing lust with operational interest,” said Nate. “An assistant general manager in this hotel could be a useful asset. Hasn’t anyone ever tried to sign her up?” The Australians looked at each other as they sat down. A waiter opened a bottle of wine.

  “A Pommy from the MI6 station three or four years back had a go,” said Bunty. “What was his name?”

  “Nigel. Nigel something,” said Marigold.

  “But no progress was made,” said Bunty. “Our girl Grace reportedly went to university in the Land of the Dry Towel. She loathes England,” said Bunty. Nate looked over to Marigold for an explanation.

  “Dry towel because Pommies bathe once a week,” she laughed.

  “Well, she must come from money to have gone to school in the UK,” said Nate.

  “No one knows. The Brits took a close look at her, and so did we, but we didn’t find much,” said Marigold, the analyst. “She might be from Foshan, close to Macao, which may account for her Eurasian looks.”

  “Which may in turn explain why she’s so standoffish,” said Bunty, the case officer. “The Chinese are funny about mixed-race women, call them ham shui mui, ‘salt-water girls,’ because they were supposedly conceived on ships in the harbor.”

  “What’s her Chinese name?” asked Nate. It was customary for Chinese who deal with Westerners to choose a more easily pronounced Western name.

  Marigold shook her head. “It’s something strange, but I can’t recall. I can look it up tomorrow,” she said.

  “Enough about the Pearl River Delta,” said Bunty. “You’d be wasting your time on her. We have to give you a bit of the drum on this Macao lark. All unofficial, mate, if you please.”

  Nate nodded. “We’re partners on this op,” he said. “Shoot.”

  “The Blunt End has just had the Winter Web,” said Bunty. “And our greedy PLA general topped the agenda.” Marigold anticipated the question.

  “The Web is a quarterly budget and planning session in ASIS headquarters. As in ‘the tangled webs we weave,’ ” she said. “And we lovingly refer to our headquarters in Canberra as ‘the Blunt End.’ ”

  “We call Langley the Puzzle Palace,” said Nate. “Blunt End is better.”

  “Annual budgets for the service rise and fall according to operational successes,” said Bunty.

  “Not to mention the careers of the tall poppies who take credit for what happens in the field,” said Marigold. “We’ve had a long line of tossers over the years—The Cumquat, Spud Ben Gurion, Captain Dirty.”

  “We have that particular species in our Headquarters too,” said Nate.

  “Just so you know, there’s considerable pressure to make our Macao outing a success,” said Bunty. “The chief of the section that manages Hong Kong and Macao—we call him FIGJAM—hopes one day to become director general. He’s bricked it—shitting bricks, sending ten telegrams a day, second-guessing our plans and, since you’ve arrived, questioning your expertise, proficiency, and competence.”

  “And your lineage,” said Marigold, batting her eyelashes at Nate, chin in her hand. “But we told him we don’t know the bastard well enough yet.”

  “This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” said Nate. “Will your service fly me to Canberra for the medal ceremony after we bag the general?”

  “Don’t count on it, mate,” said Bunty. “FIGJAM will be blocking the door, claiming the credit.”

  “Can’t wait to meet him,” said Nate. “What’s FIGJAM mean?”

  “Stands for ‘fuck I’m great, just ask me,’ ” said Marigold.

  “You’re absolutely sure he’s not from CIA Headquarters?” said Nate.

  “We just wanted you to know what a screamer this op is for us,” said Bunty.

  “I appreciate that,” said Nate. “There’s only one thing to do; we’re bringing the general’s head back in a wicker basket.” Marigold shook her head.

  “I can barely understand you with all the American slang you use,” she said.

  Droll, intuitive, smart, and skillful, thought Nate. He was glad he had these two on his side, and he knew he could trust COS Burns to support him in Langley, whichever way the operation went. He didn’t know what to expect from the panicked PLA general; or whether his own Russian would suffice; or if he could sell the false-flag approach; or how to deal with the Gordian knot challenge of hostile MSS surveillance. The rigors of his past internal operations on the streets of Moscow seemed relatively straightforward in comparison.

  Just then Grace Gao walked across the dining room, nodding at diners, conferring with the maître d’, inspecting the already-immaculate table settings. If she saw the Australians and Nate, she didn’t acknowledge them. From across the room, Nate watched her movements—light and balanced—and how she held things in her hands, a menu, a wineglass, a linen napkin. When she turned in profile, Nate noted the slight swell of her stomach and buttocks, the fine line of her chin and jaw, the prominent, straight nose, and the rise and fall of her camisole top, stretched flat as a drumhead. She had no idea she was being watched and probably would not have cared. Marigold leaned across the table and handed Nate a menu.

  “She’s really not on,” she said softly. “Not recruitable. Totally locked up inside.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Nate, lifting his wineglass. “Here’s to the general.”

  THE PENINSULA ROLLS-ROYCE COCKTAIL

  Fill a mixing glass with ice. Measure one bar spoon of Benedictine, 15ml of Mancino Secco Vermouth, 15ml of Mancino Rosso Vermouth and 60ml of Tanqueray No. Ten Gin into the glass. Stir for ten seconds. Remove a chilled glass from the freezer and strain the mix into it. Serve with an orange twist to garnish.

  26

  An Outhouse Door in a Hurricane

  The signal from Boothby’s agent came two days later, sooner than anyone expected. Zhong Jian Fang, Lieutenant General Tan Furen of the PLARF, had landed after midnight at Macao International Airport on a PLA Air Force Xian MA60 short-range turboprop, and had been driven to his usual hotel, the Conrad Macao on the Cotai Strip, one of three luxury hotel-casinos stacked side by side like shimmering neon bookends along the traffic-choked Estrada do Istmo.

  General Tan was shown to a VIP suite—his status as a PLA general was subordinate to his casino designation as a high-stakes whale—and after an hour in his room w
ith a favorite escort from South Africa known as “Air Jaws,” went down to the gaming floor where, in the wee hours of the morning, he lost an additional $50,000 at blackjack and fāntān, an obscure Chinese variant of roulette. As usual, his ardor for gaming was suddenly eclipsed by visions of the firing wall, and he summoned Boothby’s agent to his suite at 0500 hours to urgently beg him to arrange a meeting with his Russian “friend” who, the general hoped, would agree to become his benefactor. There was need for haste, the general blubbered, because casino officials that evening had displayed a marked reluctance to honor his gambling markers, an ominous indicator that scandal was around the corner.

  Boothby’s agent—his cryptonym was CAESAR—had immediately texted yǒu yuán qiān lǐ lái xiāng huì to Bunty’s nonattributable ops cell phone, the Chinese proverb meaning “Fate brings people together no matter how far apart they may be.” It was the signal that the meeting with the general at Fernando’s Restaurant on Hac Sa Beach was on for tonight at 1900. A flurry of ops cables at 0600 local to Canberra (where it was 0800) and Langley (1800 the day before) kept the encrypted channels glowing cherry red throughout the morning. ASIS South China Chief FIGJAM dictated a brace of niggling, futile cables warning about “ambush and provocation,” while CIA Chief of China Ops Elwood Holder sent a one-line message of “Good luck, good hunting.” Not to be outdone, CIA Chief of Counterintelligence Simon Benford released a two-word cable that simply said, “Scare Me.” Game on.

  Bunty and Nate met at the Macao ferry terminal in Kowloon at 1000 and boarded the stubby burgundy-colored hydrofoil for the hour-long dash past sugarloaf islands of the South China Sea, their peaks cloaked in a humid haze. The two officers slipped on board in the midst of a crowd of chattering Chinese day-trippers, and sat apart on airliner seats with cloth covers on the headrests, listening to the grommets in the overhead panels chittering with the vibration, as the hydrofoil skimmed over a dead-flat sea, throwing a rooster tail of white spray behind it. Nate wore a lightweight summer suit and a shirt with a long pointed collar; a florid necktie in a vertigo-inducing pattern favored by fashion-challenged Russian officials worldwide was in his pocket. He had slicked his dark hair down with a perfumed pomade supplied by Marigold, and wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses with lightly smoked lenses. The light disguise would break up his profile.