The Asset

by Saul Herzog

  “That man you met. He and I were friends, once. We’ve been through more shit together than you’d believe.”

  “But he let you down?”

  “He did more than that.”

  “You don’t trust him?”

  “That would be an understatement.”

  “He hurt you, didn’t he? Something personal.”

  Lance looked at her, then looked away.

  Sam nodded. She finished her drink and stood up.

  “You’re not staying for another one?”

  “I’m going to call it a night,” she said.

  “All right.”

  “Just one last question,” she said.

  He looked at her.

  “That woman with him. What happens to her? She’s not your friend?”

  29

  Tatyana woke to the chime on her phone. She checked the time. It was an hour since she’d set it. She’d slept right through.

  It took more willpower than usual for her to get up from the bed. She wanted nothing more than to close the curtains and call it a day. She hoped she wasn’t coming down with something.

  She opened the file system on her phone and checked to see what Igor had sent. The last minute change of target was a minor snag, she was so used to these missions she barely looked at the research. Her job was to play dumb and drop her panties. In general, the less she knew, the better.

  Her original target, the trade negotiator, had been a sixty-five year old Canadian. The new guy was a fifty-eight year old American. It made no difference to Tatyana. It wasn’t a date. He was an advisor to a senator from Rhode Island. That definitely bumped him up the priority ladder. He’d been involved in negotiating the latest round of sanctions against Russia, which explained the top floor’s interest.

  There was nothing the top dogs hated more than sanctions. Even the country’s most powerful oligarchs had seen their net worth, and foreign holdings, drop precipitously as a result. Combined with the recent drops in the price of oil, Russian billionaires were in for a rough Christmas.

  The target’s name was Sheldon Goldin and he seemed a little puritanical for Tatyana’s liking. Happily married for twenty-nine years, he was an ardent church-goer, attending Trinity Episcopal in Newport every Sunday morning. He had three daughters in their twenties, all in Ivy League schools, all dating eligible bachelors from prestigious families.

  None of them would want to see daddy getting his freak on.

  Tatyana knew the value of a target like that. The GRU wanted him not just for the information he held directly, but as a potential means of tapping the senator. Planting spyware, avoiding firewalls, hacking email servers, those were all things that got a lot easier to do when you had someone on the inside.

  Not that any of that would be her job. She would make sure he got caught on camera with his pants down. What the top floor did with it was up to them.

  She knew a lot of what she did got wasted. If a target resisted, if he called their bluff, there wasn’t a whole lot they could do to him. They could send the footage to the man’s wife, or leak it to a local political opponent, but the GRU had to be careful not to overplay its hand. If people caught on that there was a concerted attack, they’d react. They’d adapt. And kompromat would lose its effectiveness.

  The trick was keeping people in the dark, making each target feel like he was the only one who’d been caught, making him feel isolated.

  In most cases, just having the footage was enough. It would never be leaked. Never viewed. Just stored on a server somewhere in Russia, along with similar footage on literally thousands of other men from countries all over the planet. A diplomat in Estonia. A congressional staffer in DC. A trader on Wall Street. A journalist in London. All that footage added up to a massive arsenal of influence.

  And once they got a target to do something small for them, tip them off on a story, or send the minutes of a meeting, even something that wasn’t illegal, something of limited value, something in the public domain like the phone number of a judge, once they did anything, the GRU owned them.

  Because then, they hadn’t just cheated on their wife, reprehensible as that was, they’d aided the enemy. They’d crossed the line.

  That was when you really had something. That was when you had the first step on a path that led all the way from law-abiding citizen, to out-and-out treason.

  That was the kompromat game, and it was Tatyana’s bread and butter. It was what she and the other widows lived and breathed. It was what paid their bills and kept the lights on. And it was what kept Russia in the top tier, even now, with its military spending down to ninth in the world, barely above that of South Korea, and well below countries like France, Germany and Britain.

  With its economy slipping, its military faltering, its super power status nothing more than a memory, kompromat, human intelligence, good old fashioned espionage, was what kept Russia on page one of the President’s Daily Brief, and had since the final days of Hitler, and Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito.

  Igor had sent photos. The target was balding, jowly, the bottom half of his face reminded Tatyana of the bullmastiff a neighbor in her building in Moscow owned. The animal drooled nonstop, left big globs on the carpet in the elevator.

  The target’s reported income in the previous year was over two million dollars, mostly earned lobbying the state senate in Providence on behalf of Elmaria Mutual, Northern Citizen Bank, and other large financial companies with a significant presence in Rhode Island.

  Despite his church attendance and apparently happy marriage, he’d been deemed corruptible by the GRU. Tatyana looked at that part of the report closest. It was the part that affected her most. It said he’d traveled to Beijing six months earlier. It wasn’t government work, something on behalf of one of his financial clients, but being on the list meant a junior member of the diplomatic staff at the Russian consulate in Beijing wrote a report.

  The staffer met Goldin at a meeting at the Mandarin Oriental, and afterward invited him to a strip club. At the club, Goldin threw around a lot of money, got hideously drunk, and spent the night in one of the club’s champagne suites. According to the report, those suites weren’t cheap, and weren’t for the faint of heart. Whoever Goldin was on Sunday mornings in Newport, that wasn’t who he was in the champagne suite.

  Reports like this were the true contribution Igor had made to his country. They were the oxygen of his program. He’d spent decades traveling the world, meeting with Russian embassy officials and consular staff, impressing on them the importance of his list, the Black List he called it, and sending them notifications anytime anyone important was scheduled to travel to their city.

  If an embassy staffer met with someone on the list, and filled out a simple report afterwards, they got a thousand dollars. Even if nothing happened, even if the most important detail the report contained was how the target took his coffee, it was a thousand dollars for the embassy official. And Igor always paid, always on time, no questions asked. It was something the staffers could rely on, and they filled out the reports diligently. If the report actually covered something interesting, something truly compromising, the price went up exponentially.

  The report Tatyana was reading on Goldin had probably earned its author five thousand dollars. If there’d been photos of Goldin in the strip club, or video of him getting a lap dance or something, it might have been worth twenty.

  It wasn’t a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, but more than enough to keep the keyboards clacking at Russian embassies around the world.

  The truth was, finding targets wasn’t difficult. There were so many men around the world who had access to things Russia could benefit from, information systems, communications networks, financial data, that you’d be hard-pressed to go to a city, even the remotest backwater, and not come up with a list of good targets. And with Igor’s budget, a steady flow of reports was assured.

  Tatyana knew there was scarcely a world leader left that Igor didn’t have
dirt on. Even the countries with female leaders.

  Tatyana went into the bathroom to get ready. She looked at herself in the mirror. She knew she was attractive, although she didn’t always feel it. She had the classic Russian physique that men the world over seemed to bend the rules for. Igor told her she had the face of an angel and the body of a stripper. It was probably a compliment. But sometimes when she looked in the mirror she couldn’t help seeing her mother. And when she pictured her mother, she was always dead. Those days in the apartment, the lifeless eyes, the flesh slowly turning rancid, sometimes she woke up so drenched in sweat she had to change the sheets.

  She’d been trained in two principal means of attack. Either she would work a target hard, like a stripper who was behind on her rent, or she would capitalize on the baby face, put her hair in braids, wear knee-length socks and a school girl skirt, and make the target feel like she needed his help.

  Neither approach was guaranteed to succeed. She took her job seriously. She knew who buttered her bread. And she knew this mark could go either way.

  Getting freaky at a private club in Beijing was one thing. A city like that could feel like another world to a guy used to the pace of Newport or Providence. There was no guarantee he’d act with the same sense of abandon closer to home. Manhattan was a world of its own, it could put a spell on people, but Tatyana knew she would have to help it along.

  She was used to that. That was what made her good at her job.

  Her first targets had all been foreign embassy staffers stationed in Moscow. Those guys were deemed fair game for training purposes. No one really expected her to succeed. They were far from home, and Moscow had a healthy reputation for hedonism, but the staffers all had their guards up. They knew where they were. They knew the GRU was watching. Honing her skills in that difficult environment helped her develop the techniques she would use on this Sheldon Goldin.

  She put on the Chanel dress she’d purchased downstairs, some provocatively high black stilettos, and a Chanel purse. She tied her hair up, revealing as much of the dress’s jeweled neckline as possible.

  When she was ready, she went down to the lobby and ordered herself a martini. It would help get her in the mood.

  She’d also learned that men liked the smell of alcohol on a woman. It got their hopes up. And it helped explain what might otherwise seem like unusually forward behavior.

  She sat at a table and the waiter brought candied almonds with the drink. Her job now was to wait. Her operator would tell her the next move.

  She sipped her drink and watched the other people in the bar. Hotels like this had a certain type of clientele. Ordinary expense accounts wouldn’t cover it. These were people who owned things. Companies. Countries.

  Her phone dinged and she shut her eyes before looking at it.

  This was it. Personal time was over. It was time to earn her keep.

  But when she looked at the phone it wasn’t her operator, but Ayaan. She looked at her watch and then decided to answer.

  “What is it, Ayaan?”

  “Someone was here.”

  “What?”

  “They asked for you.”

  “What do you mean, asked for me?”

  “She said you asked her to introduce you to someone. A man. At a bar.”

  “She?”

  “The woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “A woman came here. Someone like you. Nice clothes. Walked like she had a stick up her ass.”

  “Who was she?”

  “I don’t know, but she said she knew someone who got a mail box without ID and wanted to leave her a message.”

  “What was the message?”

  “It’s a bar around the corner. The Horse’s Head. Your date will be there at midnight.”

  “My date?”

  “Take your own messages from now on.”

  “Ayaan,” she said but he hung up.

  30

  Igor stepped out of the elevator and tried to look relaxed. He liked to think he belonged on the top floor, but his heart was thumping in a way that said he didn’t. Not yet. He’d been there of course, for meetings, for assessments of his performance, but this was his first visit as an actual player.

  An omen of things to come, he told himself.

  Before him was a heavy wooden desk with a receptionist sitting at it. She was flanked by two guards, and behind her on the wall was a large portrait of the president. His mousy eyes follow Igor around the room.

  “Direktor Aralov,” the receptionist said.

  He noted her age, her attractiveness, no one worried up here about the girls getting diddled with.

  The top floor had been designed by Stalin himself. Two floors had been combined into one, allowing for ceilings twice the usual height. It created a space like a ballroom, or the lobby of a grand hotel, rather than the maze of dingy corridors Igor usually inhabited.

  “I’m here to see….”

  “Direktor Timokhin,” the secretary said, finishing his sentence.

  He nodded.

  “If you’ll follow me,” she said, leading him down a wide corridor with a white marble floor.

  Igor ran his tongue over his lips as he followed the girl, her hips swaying left to right as if her skirt was cinched too tightly at the knee.

  To say the corridor was opulent was an understatement. Gold flagpoles extended from the walls, and inlaid wooden panels bearing the nation’s coat of arms decorated each set of double doors. They passed about ten of these doors before the secretary came to a halt.

  Igor straightened his jacket. He was carrying a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka and he passed through the doors holding it out in front of him like a schoolboy presenting a gift to his teacher.

  He’d been expecting to enter Timokhin’s office but found himself in yet another anteroom, with another desk and another secretary sitting at it.

  “Direktor Aralov,” the new secretary said, getting to her feet.

  Behind her were two more soldiers, two more flags, two more doors. To her left was an office full of women sitting at desks typing furiously.

  This secretary, even younger than the last, led him through the next set of doors where he finally found himself in Timokhin’s presence.

  Across a huge office, Timokhin was perched regally on a high-backed chair, a stunning vista visible behind him through the double-height windows.

  “Sit, Igor, sit,” Timokhin said.

  This was the top floor. This was where real power lived.

  Timokhin had gotten there by stabbing people in the back. It was a well-trodden career path in the GRU, which made it all the more impressive that he’d made a name for himself at it. They called him Black Timokhin because of the number of his rivals who’d found their way to early graves.

  He was dangerous. Even him knowing your name was dangerous.

  Igor knew that. But he was dangling a key to the top floor in front of Igor’s nose, and that was something worth taking a risk for.

  Igor placed the vodka on the table and Timokhin produced two crystal glasses from a drawer.

  Igor filled them and said, “To the motherland.”

  They knocked back their shots with a workman’s efficiency and Igor refilled them.

  “So it’s done?” Timokhin said.

  “I gave her your target.”

  “She didn’t ask questions?”

  “She trusts me.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I told her the new target came from the top floor.”

  “You old cretin,” Timokhin said.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “If you’re going to do this job,” Timokhin said, waving a hand to indicate the top floor office and all it entailed, “you have to accept what you are.”

  Igor refilled his glass.

  “Drink up,” Timokhin said, enjoying every second. “You’ll need it, selling your favorite slut down the river.”

  Igor drank and refilled both glasses. “Wha
t will happen to her?” he said.

  “Like you don’t know.”

  Igor knew Tatyana was finished. A casualty of war. He’d accepted it. But what he wanted to know was how it had happened.

  “She did it to herself,” he said.

  “Of course she did, Igor. Of course she did.”

  “You mock me, Fyodor.”

  “You tell yourself what you have to. I want you to sleep well tonight.”

  Igor downed his shot and watched Timokhin do the same. He refilled the glasses. He’d seen Timokhin slip up once before. Just a small slip. They’d been at a function, a grand gala with the wives, and Timokhin got very drunk. In the men’s room, standing in front of the urinals, Igor asked him about an operation, about a mole he was running, and Timokhin gave away that she was a woman. He’d looked across the urinals, cock in hand, and winked. A small thing, but enough.

  It was a dangerous game and Igor had no choice but to roll the dice. Tatyana may have been leaking to the Americans, but someone had found her out. Someone had reported her. And it had happened in Igor’s house, under Igor’s watch.

  “Was it the American who betrayed her?” he said.

  He knew it wasn’t. She’d been betrayed by someone on their own side. Someone closer to home.

  “Now, now, Igor,” Timokhin said. “We’re here to be friendly, not settle scores.”

  “I know,” Igor said, forcing himself to smile. “It’s just, let me confide something in you, Timokhin.”

  “Yes?” Timokhin said, leaning forward.

  They knocked back another shot and Igor refilled the glasses. “I’m not sure if you’ve heard the rumors.”

  “This building is full of rumors, Igor.”

  “Well, let me put it this way. You know I’m a man with red blood.”

  “I never doubted it,” Timokhin said.

  “I have,” he held out his hands, “appetites.”

  “Let me assure you,” Timokhin said, “it would take a lot more than appetites, as you put it, to shock me.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Igor said.