The Children's Game

by Max Karpov

  “He’s agreed to meet with you in London tomorrow afternoon. It’s set up, actually.” Martin reached for his bag. “I’ve got your travel documents here.”

  “Ah. You know how to spoil a man’s vacation.”

  This time, Martin didn’t smile. He looked at Chris with anticipation, until it was clear to both of them that he would accept. Anna would be disappointed; but she wouldn’t object. Anna was a veteran diplomat, whose rivers of patience ran deeper than his. It was one of her talents to absorb setbacks without showing it. Also, Anna believed, as he did, in serving when called.

  “What do you expect he’s going to tell us?”

  “A name. Someone Turov’s dealing with. Hopefully a date. Whatever’s going to happen, it’s going to be soon, possibly within a week. He’s agreed to answer two questions. After that, it’s up to you.”

  Christopher sighed, imagining how much Petrenko had billed Martin. But that wasn’t the point: if this really was Turov, the threat transcended cost, or any personal reservations he might have. Anna, he saw, was putting on her shirt and sandals, looking their way. “What do you think it’s about?”

  Martin wrinkled his nose. “I go back to what you wrote in your report—Turov has this idea about a new, sophisticated kind of warfare. Something we won’t anticipate. It’s about a story: Russia’s going to tell a story. They’re going to make the world believe it, and repeat it. We have indications it will probably begin with a single event. Some sort of an attack.”

  “An attack on us.”

  “In some fashion. But not the kind of attack anyone in the administration will be looking for.” Anna had slung her bag over her shoulder and was walking in a steady, graceful rhythm over the sand.

  “And what about this other thing—?” Chris said. “The signals intercepts?”

  “There’s a phrase NSA has picked up. Something called ‘the children’s game.’ We know Turov also used it in a phone conversation with the president this spring.”

  “Maybe just a reference to his grandchildren?”

  “Probably not. We think it’s the event. That could be your second question. The payment transfer is done. Surveillance arranged. All you need to do is show up in the park.”

  “Well, I’d prefer to pass on the surveillance,” Christopher said, more concerned that it would draw attention to Petrenko than to him.

  Lindgren suddenly smiled broadly, and Christopher misunderstood, thinking he was smiling at what he’d just said. But then he saw: he was looking at Anna, who was standing in the arched entryway, letting her eyes adjust.

  Martin leaned over to Christopher. “I hope she won’t be too angry with me,” he whispered.

  TWO

  Wednesday, August 11. London.

  The meeting with Max Petrenko was scheduled for twenty past four in Holland Park. Petrenko ran his business now from a rented two-room office in upscale Mayfair. He was having trouble paying rent, the London case officer told Christopher, and might have to relocate at the end of the year. If Petrenko really knew something about Turov, as Martin believed, it was probably a fluke.

  Christopher took a cab to Abbotsbury Road and walked into the park, stopping at a bench near the Japanese garden as instructed. For nine minutes he sat, glancing at the passersby. He was beginning to wonder if he’d chosen the wrong bench when he saw Petrenko marching up the path, dressed in an ill-fitting seersucker suit. For a moment Chris didn’t recognize him: the Russian had put on weight and his forehead appeared taller than he remembered. Petrenko seemed to miss him at first, walking past with swinging arms, then turning and pretending to do an elaborate double take. “Christopher Niles?”

  Chris raised his eyebrows and stood. The pretense was two old acquaintances bumping into one another in the park. “Max.”

  “My goodness. How long has it been?” They exchanged greetings over a lengthy handshake, and began to walk, Petrenko talking in his deep-throated broken English, gesturing with a familiar Russianness: balling his fingers and opening them dramatically. Telling Chris about the changes in Moscow since the late nineties when Petrenko had made his fleeting fortune there—his voice tensing up when he mentioned the current president, becoming more relaxed when the topic was Yeltsin. “I knew him, of course, years ago,” he said, meaning Putin. “In Leningrad. He was nothing then. A bureaucrat. But fiercely loyal. Later, he wanted me to travel with him. You can imagine how that would have ended.” Petrenko was talking almost like a ventriloquist now, his lips clenched and barely moving.

  “I knew Yeltsin, too, a much more gracious man,” he said, speaking robustly again. “He could have been great. History gave him that. But the alcohol . . .”

  “I’m curious, though. You asked specifically to see me.”

  “I did.”

  “You’ve heard something about our friend, I’m told,” Chris said, prompting him as they strolled past the formal gardens. “I understand you have a name.”

  “I do.” Another half-minute passed before he spoke again. Finally, he turned to Christopher and, with his ventriloquist’s lips, gave him the name—first, patronymic, and last: “Ivan Mikhailovitch Delkoff.”

  Ivan Delkoff. It was a name Christopher knew. Delkoff was one of the rogue separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine, a fanatic right-wing Russian commander. “The crazy colonel,” some in the Russian media had labeled him.

  “They met in the spring, I’m told,” Petrenko said. “In Moscow. It followed Turov’s visit to the dacha in April. I will give you the dates.”

  By dacha Chris assumed he meant the Russian president’s home, outside Moscow.

  “I’m told Delkoff was followed by FSB for several weeks early in the summer. He’s made at least two trips into Ukraine since then, supposedly to plan strategy with Russian separatists. But I understand he also met with a deputy director from SBU on at least one of them,” he added, naming Ukraine’s secret service agency.

  Christopher said nothing at first, not quite believing him. “Why would he meet with the SBU? They should be enemies. Of the worst kind.”

  “Yes, I know.” He stopped talking briefly, as a pair of joggers ran past. “Should be. Enemies with a common enemy. And purpose, perhaps.”

  Christopher processed what he was saying: the implication being that their “common enemy” was Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Could Turov be working for a fifth column within the Kremlin now? Could the target be Putin himself? That would make it a far different operation than Martin Lindgren had suggested. Did Martin know this? Did the White House?

  “You have a second question,” Petrenko said.

  “Yes.” Chris allowed a smile. “I was told our friend may be planning something called the children’s game. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Yes. It does.” Petrenko pointed to a new path, and didn’t speak again until they had come to a green lawn with a giant chessboard and two-foot-tall chess pieces, set up as if mid-game. Christopher sensed that this was where he’d been headed all along. “Sit?”

  They settled on a wooden bench facing the chess board. Petrenko nodded at it. “Children’s mate,” he said. “You call it beginner’s mate, I believe.”

  “Beginner’s mate in chess. That’s the children’s game?”

  “Yes. Would you like me to show you?”

  Christopher wondered at first if he was going to get up and move the game pieces. But he was searching for a pen, patting his shirt and trousers pockets as if doing a Columbo impression.

  “Beginner’s mate is defeating your opponent in four moves,” Chris said.

  “Correct.”

  Russia, of course, tends to underestimate the West, he thought. And overestimate itself.

  Petrenko showed his smile—which resembled a forced grimace—as if he could hear what Chris was thinking. “Of course, they say that America plays a different game,” he said. “America’s game is Pigeon Chess: you knock over the pieces, shit all over the board, and then strut around as if you’ve won.” His hea
d thrust back and he snorted twice, revealing a lopsided alignment of teeth. This was a joke that Putin himself told, Chris had heard. Anti-Americanism was still rampant in Russia, a country where nearly all television news was state-controlled. Many Russians attributed the country’s economic woes to the US. It was a classic diversion: invent a villain, then blame the villain for your troubles. “If you have one more question, go ahead,” Petrenko said, a sudden tension in his voice, “because I have to go.”

  “What’s it about?” Chris said. “What are the four moves?” Petrenko flicked the fingers of his right hand dismissively. “An attack in the Baltics? A Crimea-style forced annexation?”

  Petrenko’s head tilted to one side and his lower lip jutted out: perhaps. “Candidly? My impression is it will be something much closer to home. Your home. But I can’t tell you what.”

  “How soon?”

  “Soon.” Petrenko smiled evasively. “Days, perhaps. I don’t know, exactly.”

  “Who’s he doing this for? Who’s Turov working for if not the Kremlin?”

  Petrenko made a face, as if he hadn’t considered that, and checked his watch. “I could find out more, of course. But it would involve some risk.”

  “How much?”

  “Eighty-five?” Eighty-five thousand. Christopher Niles lifted his chin neutrally to show he had heard. He wondered what the sea breeze felt like right now on their Greek island. They rose and began to walk again, through the blue afternoon shadows to the park entrance, Chris beginning to sift what Petrenko had given him: the unlikely tip that Ukraine’s secret services were involved in Turov’s op, the threat of “something much closer to home.” He thought of a soldier he knew who’d worked with Delkoff once, a former Navy SEAL named Jake Briggs. If this was about Ivan Delkoff, then Christopher wasn’t the right man for the job. But maybe Briggs was.

  Stopping at the road, Petrenko forced a smile and clasped his arm, bringing the pretense to a close: two old acquaintances bumping into each other in the park. Petrenko moved closer, peculiarly closer, to shake his hand; he could smell the onion he’d had for lunch. When he pulled his hand away, Chris felt a USB drive in his palm.

  “One other thing you might consider,” Petrenko said. “Assuming the game is four moves? You might consider that at least one of them has already been played. Some time ago. And no one in your country noticed.” He smiled, adding, “Let me know about the offer.”

  Turning, Max Petrenko was nearly run over by a speeding bicyclist.

  THREE

  Wednesday, August 11. Eastern Ukraine.

  Ivan Delkoff sat on a wooden ammo case in the abandoned barn, looking out at fields of yellow sunflowers as he smoked a Russian cigarette. He was dressed in his usual attire—faded camo fatigues and combat boots, the boots so worn in places they resembled reptile skin.

  Alexander Zelenko, his lieutenant, was just outside talking with Pletner, the driver, telling him war stories in his nasally voice, unaware that Delkoff could hear him.

  When Delkoff had first hired Zelenko, the Russian soldier reminded him of his own son, with that resolute mouth, the prominent Adam’s apple, and dark, liquid eyes that seemed eager for anything. This talkativeness, though, was something new. Something Delkoff hadn’t seen during their weeks of training.

  The operation was two days off now and Zelenko was worrying him.

  They had stopped at this farm near Donetsk to switch vehicles and eat a quick lunch before the final leg of the journey. Zelenko had cooked the three of them chicken cutlets on a propane stove and they were having a smoke now before moving on. They were inside the checkpoints again, in Russian separatist-controlled territory, part of the self-proclaimed Republic of Donetsk, what Delkoff considered Novorossiya. New Russia. Or Malorissiya. Little Russia. But they were moving toward disputed territory, where the Ukrainian army still held positions.

  Delkoff finished his cigarette and listened to Zelenko telling Pletner about the tank battalion he’d belonged to shortly after the war began, in 2014. How one of their tanks had been hit through the turret, but they’d gone on, routing the Ukrainian guards, liberating a village from the khokhols—the derogatory term some soldiers used for Ukrainians. “Sometimes, the enemy are men just like you,” Zelenko told Pletner. “But if you think that way for long, you’re dead. In war, killing is just a survival tactic.”

  He was showing off. Using the kind of langauge he’d heard Ivan Delkoff use. He could get away with it because he was talking to Pletner, who was twenty-one and didn’t know war. Delkoff had always encouraged Zelenko—too much, he now realized; he’d probably helped give him the sort of confidence that would only get him in trouble. A prideful confidence.

  But this wasn’t just pride. Zelenko was also nervous, more than he should’ve been. Nervous about something besides the mission. A man talks when he’s no longer at peace with his thoughts. Something he had read once.

  Delkoff flicked away the last of his cigarette onto the barn floor and crushed the embers with his boot before going out. He squinted into the sun, feeling the afternoon heat on his face, smelling the odor of his own body.

  Zelenko stiffened, seeing him, but Delkoff smiled and they all turned to the fields, waiting for a breeze to rustle the sunflower stalks.

  “We ready?” Delkoff asked Pletner.

  Pletner was a tall man with broad, blunt features—but the acquiescent eyes and bright teeth of an innocent, largely indistinguishable from other young men of the same age.

  They set out again in silence, Pletner driving the camouflage Tigr reconnaissance truck along the unpaved farm road, more comfortable behind the wheel than anywhere else, as dust boiled up behind them in the heat. They rode past untended corn and onion farms, two-room wooden cottages, an unexploded missile jutting from a front yard, a combine, a schoolhouse with a Swiss-cheese pattern of artillery holes in one wall. Interrupted lives. Ukraine was the world’s largest producer of sunflower oil, but many of the farms and seed-crushing plants in Donetsk territory had been abandoned this summer. The barn where they’d stopped for lunch now stored Grad rockets and mortar shells.

  Delkoff sat in back, thinking of his family and the war, as he always did, and of those places where the two had intersected. But at the same time he watched Zelenko, giving him a hard smile each time he turned around.

  For Ivan Delkoff, the war was more than a quarter century old now. It had begun the night the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time outside the Kremlin. December 26, 1991. On Friday afternoon, it would move to a new front, in the farmland north of here. The Americans, naturally, didn’t know this. The Americans’ war had ended just as Russia’s was beginning. They’d been so busy high-fiving each other they failed to understand Russia was never going to roll over and become “Westernized.” They’d wanted a simple outcome to the so-called Cold War, something resembling one of their action films—the good guys win, the Russians lose—and arrogantly assumed that American “democracy” could be exported around the world like a fast-food franchise. But Russia was a great and complex country, with traditions that most Americans, with their truncated attention spans, did not understand. When no one bothered to correct them, they assumed they’d won, having no idea how resilient and unusual the Russian spirit could be. The Americans had been asleep all these years—as Andrei Turov had told him in the spring—inviting retaliation.

  Delkoff thought of his father—bureaucrat, soldier, patriot—who had ingrained these nationalist ideas in him, holding court with Delkoff and his brother in the living room of their tiny south Moscow apartment, drinking vodka from a fruit jar and talking of the Soviet victory over Hitler in the Great Patriotic War. A man Delkoff would never resemble, except in that fundamental belief in Russian greatness. Delkoff thought of the battles in his own life that had led him here, beginning with Transnistria in 1992, the two wars in Chechnya, and the failed secret operation in Estonia five years ago. He remembered the battles his son had fought in the Donbas, and his thoughts returned, in
evitably, to the one that had killed him on that rainy afternoon near Lugansk last summer—the stupid ambush—and he felt angry all over again.

  It was nearly dusk when they reached the farm property that would serve as the command post for Friday’s operation. Delkoff undid the padlocks on the warehouse doors and they pulled the truck inside, parking it next to the TAR—a target acquisition radar, the tank-like vehicle Delkoff had transported here two weeks ago.

  In the back of the warehouse was Delkoff’s makeshift office. He’d moved in a cot, a desk, and several folding chairs, along with a small refrigerator and steamer trunk. In the trunk was a ten-liter jerry can filled with gasoline, an automatic rifle, a Makarov handgun, a scout combat knife, and a bag containing his change of clothes, money—both euros and Ukrainian hryvnias—as well as three passports and a simple disguise Delkoff had purchased from a Moscow costume shop.

  In six and a half hours, the unmarked trucks from the north would arrive, after passing through Ukrainian-controlled territory, with the missile launcher and the mobile command post. The equipment and transports would be stored here beside the TAR until Friday afternoon, when history would change. When Delkoff’s battalion would at last open a “new front.”

  The three men sat on folding chairs in the farm road that night as the air cooled, stars glistening above the sunflower fields. Delkoff went through the operation details again and talked about battles he’d fought, in Transnistria and Chechnya, while Zelenko and Pletner listened, reserved and attentive.

  But Zelenko was looking at Delkoff a little strangely tonight. Lowering his eyes just a moment too soon several times. And that told Delkoff what he needed to know.

  No, Zelenko wasn’t like his son, after all. It wasn’t even close.

  By the time the other two men retired to the basement of the farmhouse for a few hours of sleep, Delkoff had made up his mind. It was all there in Zelenko’s eyes: the reason he was acting so nervous today wasn’t because of their mission; it was because of what he planned to do afterward.