The Children's Game

by Max Karpov

  Delkoff had dissected Turov’s plans enough by then to know that at some point they would involve a secret assassin. Delkoff knew too much to be allowed to survive, despite the magician’s assurances. And Zelenko, by appearances the most unlikely man for the job—small, timid, sneaky in a transparent way—must have been his choice, for that very reason. Zelenko was Turov’s assassin.

  “Get a few hours of sleep,” he said, patting Zelenko on the shoulder. “I’ll wake you when they arrive.”

  FOUR

  Wednesday evening, August 11. Northern Virginia.

  Walking alone from customs into the main terminal building at Dulles International Airport, Anna Carpenter felt a vague uneasiness, a sense that something was coming, something people weren’t ready for. Maybe it was just the contrast between Martin Lindgren’s urgency and the sleepy city that she was returning to. Washington officially closed for business at the end of July for a five-week summer “recess.” Members of both houses of Congress returned to their home states for the month or went on vacation. No legislation was passed, there were no committee meetings. The Supreme Court was on hiatus. Even the president was in the midst of a two-week holiday. If someone wanted to catch America asleep at the switch, August would be a pretty good time to do it.

  Mixed with these uneasy feelings were more personal concerns, which Anna had been fighting ever since leaving Christopher in Greece. It still bothered her how quickly the Turov assignment had gotten into his bloodstream. Martin had given him a taste again, and she’d seen the transformation. A reminder of how his work could turn Christopher into someone she barely recognized: compulsive, single-minded, emotionally detached. His father had given him that. Chris and his half brother were the products of a brilliant but demanding man who’d set unrealistic standards for his sons; he’d been an influential figure in the counterintelligence community for three decades, recipient of a Distinguished Intelligence Medal. People now routinely referred to Carroll Niles as a “gentleman” spy; but he’d also been a taskmaster, a remote figure who rarely praised his sons, who’d waged his own war with the Washington bureaucracy. In the weeks after Anna met Chris, she sometimes felt that he was still fighting his father’s unfinished battles.

  The interruption of their trip stirred other memories, as well, of the sudden breakup of Anna’s marriage six years ago. She still faulted herself at times for that: for being too career-minded and not making enough room for family, for failing to anticipate that her husband couldn’t deal with her becoming a public figure, or that he’d ever be unfaithful.

  Greece had been Anna’s idea. A chance to shut out the noise in their lives for a few days. She never imagined she would be returning to Washington alone, with this sort of apphrension in her head.

  “Mom!” David Carpenter, Anna’s twenty-four-year-old son, reached out and squeezed her arm, breaking her reverie. She’d almost walked right past him. “I was waving for, like, five minutes. Didn’t you see me?”

  “No, I guess I didn’t.” Anna smiled, feeling a rush of affection for her tall, earnest son. He looked sharp in jeans and a crisp blue dress shirt, watching her with his dark, inquisitive eyes. “Sorry, honey.” She rose on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “Guess I’m a little jet-lagged.”

  David took her carry-on and began to walk, staying a step ahead of his mother, deftly dodging the pedestrian traffic as if it were important to be first to baggage claim. Anna’s son was six two and a half—six inches taller than she was, and still something of a “string bean,” as people used to call him (her staff had labeled him “Jonah” once, thinking he resembled the character on Veep). But he carried himself with a professional assurance now, which seemed to have grown in proportion to his career. After floundering for a year or so during the divorce, David had found his calling in computers, without a lot of guidance from his mother—and none from his father, who’d run off to California with his much-younger girlfriend. Success had given her son ambition, rather than the other way around, and he’d risen quickly from an IT tech to a “bug hunter” to a “cybersecurity analyst.” He worked now for one of D.C.’s largest threat-intel firms, monitoring the dark web for terrorist and cybercrime activity, with clients that included defense contractors and the federal government. David’s career had given him an anchor and a sense of purpose he’d never known growing up. And it had made his mother proud.

  As they approached baggage claim, Anna noticed a two-man TSA VIPR team in body armor walking their way carrying semiautomatic rifles. Something was different at Dulles tonight, she could see. She waited until David hoisted her bag from the carousel before placing a call to Ming Hsu, her chief of staff. “I’m back,” Anna said, following her son to the garage.

  “Welcome,” Ming said, in her factual manner.

  “What’s going on at the airport? I’m at Dulles.”

  “Nothing specific. Heightened chatter. I’ll have something for you in the morning.” Anna had known Ming for more than ten years, and understood what she was saying: Go home, get a good night’s sleep. If you’re going to worry, save it for morning. She clicked off and hurried to catch up to David. For the past several weeks, signals intelligence had suggested that Russia was preparing some sort of military move in the Baltics. At the same time, there’d been increased chatter among known Russian agents within the States. As a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Anna had been briefed on both issues before leaving for vacation. But tonight was the first she’d heard anything about US airports.

  David, she saw, had stopped in the parking garage, setting her bags down behind a smart car. “This is your car?” she said. “When did you get this?”

  “It’s Malika’s.” He pointed a key fob and the hatch popped open. “Don’t worry, it’s safe.”

  Anna’s concern was less about safety than about how David, she, and the luggage were all going to fit. But her bags went right in. He shut the hatch as if he’d done this many times. Malika was David’s first serious girlfriend, a woman about half his size and far more outgoing, but for mysterious reasons, they were a good match. He’d met her at work last year, and they’d recently moved into a house together out in the Maryland suburbs.

  “Careful,” Anna said as he lurched into the aisle lane. It was the first time she’d been in a smart car and it didn’t feel safe at all. It felt as if two-thirds of the car were missing.

  “We get a lot of clown car jokes,” David said. An SUV going much too fast swerved around them, horn blaring, as he pulled into the traffic lane. “Jerk,” he muttered, glancing in his side mirror to see if anything else was coming.

  They rode in silence out onto I-66, David driving a little fast. Anna finally relaxed enough to check her phone for messages and news. Besides the ongoing political wars between Democrats and Republicans, there were more tensions with Russia: in the Baltic Sea, a Russian Su-24 fighter jet had flown within sixty feet of a British Navy ship. There was also a vague report about a plan to attack American universities in the fall, with a “possible Russia link.” But once she got past the headline, Anna saw that the “plan” amounted to nothing more than an email exchange between two college students in North Dakota, one of them born in Russia.

  “So?” David said, as if they’d arrived in a safety zone. “What’s going on, Mom?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re back three days early. Chris isn’t with you. There were VIPR teams at the airport. There’s been a spike in troll activity and some strange cyber hacks over the past two days—”

  Anna turned off her phone. “I told you, Chris was called away on business.” They rode in silence for another mile, Anna watching the mirrored office buildings, the gauzy afterglows of sunset. “But tell me about that,” she said. “A ‘spike in troll activity’?”

  “Yeah.” David glanced at his mother. “Just—some weird stuff coming across.”

  “Okay. And could you be a tad more specific?”

  David smiled. He cleared his thr
oat unnecessarily, a habit from his teenage years. Sometimes, Anna learned things by comparing notes with her son. But it usually took a little prodding. “The intel is that Russia is planning something against NATO, right? Or against us?” Anna allowed a small “mmm-hmm,” to keep him going. “Isn’t that why there were VIPR teams at the airport?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “What’s the ‘weird’ part?”

  “The weird part is there’s tons of online activity all of a sudden saying the opposite.”

  “Really. The opposite being what—that we’re planning something against Russia?”

  “Yeah.” He gave her an appraising glance. “You don’t know about that?”

  “No, I guess I don’t.” Anna wondered if this was why David had seemed so anxious to pick her up at the airport tonight. “What sites are we talking about?”

  “Military websites at first. But it’s all over Twitter now.”

  “Think you could show me?”

  “Sure. If you want.”

  Anna knew that Russia’s so-called troll factories churned out thousands of phony Internet posts each day, flooding Western news sites with pro-Russia and anti-Western opinions, along with fabricated stories promoting Moscow’s agendas. The government also sponsored automated bot programs that repackaged pro-Russia opinions and had managed to plant malware on systems throughout the United States. The Kremlin actively recruited freelancers—some of them students, some from the cybercrime underworld—for this work, for what were euphemistically called “science squads.” Washington didn’t have an equivalent program or effective countermeasures, and there were moral and ethical questions about how far the US should go in developing them. For years—as a congresswoman and as an intelligence analyst at the State Department—Anna had pushed for a stronger legal framework for cyberwarfare, without much success.

  “Did you say cyber attacks, too? Against us?”

  “No, cyber hacks,” David said. “Against us, NATO, European governments. You know what Russia’s motto is, right, Mom? Do unto others as you think they’re going to do unto you.”

  Anna laughed. That sounded right. She was reminded of Putin’s famous remark about ISIS in Syria: “As I learned on the streets of Leningrad, if a fight is inevitable, then you strike first.”

  “So what do you think?” she said. “What are you hearing?”

  “Something in the Baltics?” He exhaled dramatically. “I mean. Russia could move on Latvia or Belarus in three or four days and we couldn’t do much to stop them, right?”

  “Maybe,” Anna said. “But not without creating international outrage.”

  He seemed to hesitate before agreeing with her. “Unless they were able to convince people that they had a legitimate reason for it.”

  “Is that what you’re hearing?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I’m just saying it’s possible.”

  “Okay.” Anna thought about that, and the scenario in the Baltics that had been talked about for years: Russia creates a pretext for striking a NATO neighbor. NATO is then forced under Article 5 to respond. If it doesn’t, Russia has, among other things, rendered NATO obsolete.

  David glanced at his mother expectantly now, as if she were going to tell him more. But she wasn’t; she was thinking. They settled into a long silence, coming at last to the rolling, leafy suburban neighborhood where Anna lived. Her house was a split-level, built in the early sixties; it had come with an acre of property and a creek, which created the illusion of being in the country even though she lived just ten minutes from the Capital Beltway.

  Anna’s nearly identical dachshunds, Zoey and Mr. Smith, skittered maniacally to greet her as she came in, their toenails scratching on the hardwood floor. It was Wednesday, so Carlotta, her housekeeper, was off until morning. It felt good to see the familiar furnishings, the antique chairs and tables Anna had inherited from her grandparents, the art pieces she’d collected in her travels, the pile of New Yorkers, the photos of family and of people she’d known during her career in public service.

  Anna knelt to give the dogs some attention and they quickly rolled onto their backs in surrender mode. “How’s Mr. Smith?” she said, rubbing his belly. “How’s Zoey?” The dogs had been named as pups eight years ago. David had suggested “Joey” and “Zoey.” David’s father—Anna’s ex—thought that Mr. and Mrs. Smith would be funny names, for some reason. So, in the way that family decisions were made back then, they compromised, ending up with Zoey and Mr. Smith. It struck Anna as a very Washington kind of solution.

  “Malika made you some crabbies,” Kevin said, hesitant, it seemed, to come inside. “They’re in the refrigerator.”

  “Okay, good.” With both dogs satisfied, Anna stood. Kevin often brought over Malika’s famous “crabbies”—crab meat mixed with cheese-and-horseradish spread, heated on baked bread rounds—knowing that Anna loved them.

  “Want to come in and have one with me?”

  “No, I can’t stay. Early meeting tomorrow,” he said, summoning his deeper, more declarative voice.

  “All right, then.” After seeing him off, Anna poured an inch of scotch with a splash of water and sampled one of Malika’s crabbies. Delicious, as always. She went into Christopher’s study with her drink and checked messages for a while. The room was immaculate, as he’d left it; same as the small apartment Chris still kept downtown. She imagined where he was right now—a hotel room in London, asleep probably—and wondered what he had learned today about Andrei Turov.

  She skimmed several of the sites David had given her, and discovered a few on her own, browsing through posts claiming that the US was planning “covert action” or a “BIG MOVE” against Russia. Several posts contained similar misspellings and grammatical errors, suggesting they came from the same source.

  She found two emails in her in-box from Harland Strickland, the administration’s senior director for counterterrorism, and a friend. Strickland had left the same message twice: “Call ASAP when you return. We need to talk.” Anna decided it could wait until morning. Strickland was a presidential adviser with an inside track on upper-tier intelligence issues. But he was also something of a character. His “ASAP” was rarely as urgent as it sounded.

  Before preparing for bed Anna studied the framed photo of Christopher on the bookshelf. It was one of her favorites, a candid moment caught last spring on a hiking trail in the Blue Ridge Mountains: Chris turned, half-smiling at her over his shoulder. Seeing the clarity and peace in his blue-gray eyes, she wondered what their life would’ve been like if they had discovered each other twenty years earlier. If he had become an academic instead of a spy.

  She took a hot shower, pulled on pajamas, flossed and brushed, then crawled into bed. She lay awake for a while in the darkness, listening to a light rain in the trees through her open window. Thinking about Christopher and Greece, about how the sunlight had sparkled on the Aegean so promisingly Tuesday morning. About Russia. And the strange apprehension she’d carried home to Dulles. What had that been about?

  Anna knew she couldn’t talk to anyone about Christopher’s assignment, but what David had told her tonight was a different business. Over the past two decades, she had built up a network of good contacts in the intelligence and military communities. Anna was looking forward to calling on some of them in the morning.

  FIVE

  Thursday, August 12. Capitol Hill, Washington.

  By late morning, though, it was no clearer to Anna Carpenter what was going on with Russia than it had been the night before. She’d gone in early to her tiny “hideaway” office in the basement of the US Capitol, savoring the quiet and the chance to spend an hour by herself working the phone. But no one had told her anything she didn’t already know.

  She was back in her office on the fifth floor of the Hart Senate Office Building at lunchtime, finishing a phone call, when Anna heard a familiar voice in her outer office. She looked up, surprised to see Harland Strickland, the counterterrorism adviser to the president, chat
ting with Ming. Anna recalled the messages he’d left her the day before: Call ASAP when you return. We need to talk.

  “Greetings!” he announced, strolling in with his easy, loose-jointed stride as soon as she set her phone down. “Heard you came back early. Sorry to surprise you. Bad time?”

  “No, good time. I tried to reach you earlier.”

  “I saw your call.” She gestured for him to sit but Harland was already helping himself, pulling at the creases of his pants, stretching out his long legs. Harland Strickland was in his mid-sixties but looked ten years younger, his once-boyish face grown more authoritative with age and with the rakish salt-pepper goatee he’d added last year. “So—how was the trip?”

  “While it lasted: perfect,” Anna said.

  “Good, good.” He set the dark green file folder he was carrying on her desk, and gave Anna his customary once-over, as if she were wearing a low-cut blouse. Anna dressed conservatively; there wasn’t much to see. Strickland was a charmer, with a self-confidence that was set a notch too high, Anna sometimes thought. When she was in the midst of her divorce, they’d gone out for drinks a few times. Sometimes now he acted as if their relationship were more personal than it really was. “Talk in private?” he said, glancing at the door.

  “If you’d like.”

  “Have you heard about this?” He pushed the folder across her desk.

  Anna opened it. Inside was a two-page printout, a news story, dateline Washington. Anna began to read, with growing surprise. After two paragraphs, she looked up. “What is this?”

  “It’s the story the Post wants to run tomorrow. The Weekly American has the same thing. It was alluded to in Jon Niles’s blog this morning. As you may know.” He gave her a sober look and let it linger, implying that she had some sub-rosa connection to Christopher’s little brother. Anna continued reading.