The Children's Game

by Max Karpov

  Turov had moved here full-time in the spring, after hiring Delkoff, so that he could monitor the operation from a safe distance. His younger daughter Svetlana jokingly called this room his “space capsule,” because of the row of computer monitors on his work table, which seemed to her incongruous with the country setting. On her last night here, before leaving for Switzerland, Svetlana had looked at Turov like a little girl and asked, in her needy voice, “Do we really have to go away again? Aren’t you coming with us?”

  “I am coming,” he said. “Of course, I am. But I have meetings first.”

  Svetlana, watching him with her stark, still-innocent eyes, had suddenly broken into a sob, as if the unknown were too much for her to bear. At times like that, he sensed, she just wanted to be hugged by her father. Svetlana’s fear of abandonment had grown worse over the past three years, particularly since her older sister Sonya had moved away. What a strange, clinging companion memory was. The set of Svetlana’s mouth retained traces of her childhood pucker, a look that most little girls lost as they became teenagers. It still reminded Turov of a particular moment: an afternoon in the country, high summer, cottonwood seeds swimming in the air, when as a still-young man Turov had looked into his infant daughter’s eyes and they’d had a stare-off, Turov with an adult’s sense of wonder, recognizing that this little creature possessed her own consciousness, that she would grow into a woman with political opinions, prejudices, and a sense of morality. And he’d felt a great responsibility at that moment to keep her from the world’s corruptions. It was a responsibility he still felt today. Svetlana did not remember that, of course. The memory was only his.

  Both of Turov’s daughters had been enticed by the West’s empty promises, for no other reason than that they were young and controlled by their passions, by adrenaline and pheromones. But Svetlana had come back to him and Sonya had left. Putin was right, of course: American culture was poisoning the world with its poshlost, its action movie values and immoral youth culture. The decadence of Moscow was very much an imported Western decadence, shamelessly preying on human vulnerability. Svetlana’s older sister had been spoiled by it, embarrassing him as a teenager before going off to live in England with her mother, whose life had ended tragically. Svetlana had been spoiled, too, but not permanently. She’d become pregnant, out of wedlock, but she’d been responsible enough to acknowledge her mistakes and come back to her father. And he had taken care of her, and the twins, as he always would.

  Alone now, Turov allowed himself to savor a private glow of victory, watching the sky darkening through the trees. He took half an hour to monitor the reaction online, seeing that Anton was right: the news was all good, better even than he’d expected.

  He sipped a glass of Russian red wine, as he did each evening before closing his office; and he felt even better, preparing for the pleasant walk back by the lake to the main house, where Olga would come to visit him later.

  But as he shut down his computers, Turov was startled to see a figure walking along the trail through the mist, moving like a figment from a ghost story. The man’s small, sturdy stature made him think for a moment that it was Putin himself, or his ghost, coming here for a reckoning. Then he realized that it was only Anton, returning for another unscheduled meeting.

  Anton waited silently outside as Turov finished shutting down and locking up his office. Then they walked together toward the lake through the night shadows.

  “There’s been a problem, boss,” Anton said. “A problem at the checkpoints. Everything did not go to plan.”

  “A problem with the Ukrainians, you mean?”

  “No. The Ukrainians were fine. Everything with the Ukrainians went smoothly. The problem was the other side,” Anton said. “The other team missed the checkpoints. The men are unaccounted for.”

  “Zelenko?”

  “Unaccounted for.”

  Andrei Turov stopped walking. How was this even possible? They’d spent weeks training Zelenko and Pletner, and hired backup security at the checkpoints as insurance. He studied Anton’s whiskered face, and looked past him, to the dark houses, the familiar wooden roofs, the moon seemingly perched in the pine branches.

  “Delkoff?”

  “Unaccounted for. I have men on the way there now. I assure you we’ll get him.”

  Turov had no doubt about that; but would they get him in time?

  So, Turov thought, my instinct about Delkoff was correct after all. Although he hadn’t expected such an elaborate betrayal. Turov had taken a chance with Ivan Delkoff, a man he didn’t really know, despite their extensive vetting. Delkoff had connections in the murky Donbas. He knew the officers and soldiers who could be bought and sold and trusted not to talk. He had the skills to mobilize a small group of men to take Russia’s war to a “new front.” But Delkoff was also primitive, hungry, and impulsive. Who knew what he’d do if allowed to survive?

  “We need to stop him, Anton, wherever he is.”

  “I know. Apparently, there was a fire at the launch site. One or two men were killed there. He may already be dead. I’m waiting on details.” He said this as if it were somehow reassuring. But it only made Andrei Turov more concerned.

  “Wake me with news, Anton,” he said, trying to remain calm. “Wake me any time of the night. We need to put everything we can into this.”

  “We will. We are.”

  But Anton did not return to him with any more news. And Turov endured a long, very difficult night, listening to the tree frogs and the wind scraping branches on the side of the house. At daybreak, Olga’s goodbye was tender but weighted down by his own uncertainty.

  And, then, later that morning, Anton made another unscheduled visit to Turov’s office. It was not to deliver the news Turov hoped to hear. It was again something unexpected: Andrei Turov was being summoned by the Kremlin, for a meeting at noon on Tuesday.

  FOURTEEN

  Capitol Hill, Washington.

  When Anna Carpenter returned to her office at the Hart Senate building, she found five printouts spread across her desk. Ming Hsu, her chief of staff, was good at keeping Anna apprised of whatever was trending in official Washington. The reports from the Russian media sites were now trumpeting a new allegation: not only had a “secret CIA committee” met to discuss a possible strike on Russia, but they had devised a plan that would leave “no US fingerprints,” according to “sources.”

  “Where did this start?” Anna asked.

  “The German newspaper SZ had it just as you were going in to the meeting,” Ming said, looking on with her knowing eyes. “It’s gone whirly in the last hour. It’s just starting to get into the mainstream media. The Post has it with a breaking news banner.”

  She pushed one of the stories closer, from USAToday.com. Anna read: “In the weeks before today’s attack on the Russian president’s plane, US intelligence and military officials met secretly to discuss plans for a ‘preemptive’ strike against Russia, according to a German newspaper report. The talks included high-level negotiations between US military intelligence officials and an anti-Putin Ukrainian oligarch named Dmitro Hordiyenko, a supporter of right-wing paramilitary forces, according to unnamed sources.”

  “Geez,” Anna said. “This can’t be happening.”

  “I know,” Ming said. “But it is. People are repeating it. They’re saying you can’t make this stuff up.”

  Yes you can, Anna thought. Of course you can. She turned her eyes to the atrium. This is coming too fast. Way too fast. Even assuming none of it was true, it would take a major PR counteroffensive to refute these claims. “Can you get Harland Strickland on the phone?”

  Her mind kept flashing to Harland’s visit to her office the day before, and their brief conversation. But Harland was not available. Anna sat at her desk and tried several other colleagues without success. Even her son was suddenly out of reach. She tried Christopher again, feeling the same uneasiness she had coming off the plane on Wednesday evening. But his phone went to voice mail.
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  “Turn on CNN!” Ming shouted from the outer office. Something new was coming across—a video clip posted to YouTube showing the moment of impact: the missile’s trail of smoke, the Russian president’s plane exploding, the image freezing just as the debris began to rain down.

  Anna watched the footage loop, spellbound and horrified, reminded of the 9/11 video of the airliners crashing into the World Trade Center towers; that, too, had played repeatedly on cable news before the networks finally realized it was in bad taste to keep showing it.

  She took an elevator to the ground floor and slipped out of the building onto Constitution Avenue. She wanted to breathe some real air for a few minutes, to get out among the trees and people and clear her head. Others seemed to be doing the same. A lot of them. She walked toward the National Mall, thinking of times she’d come out here to marvel at the man-made grandeur, the symmetry of the monuments and neoclassical buildings, the remarkable stories they told about her country.

  She stood on a corner and looked through the trees at the Capitol dome, remembering that she was two blocks from what had most likely been the fourth target of the September 11 attacks. She thought about her father and the “divided nature” he used to tell her we all carry around in us—a capacity for greatness and a capacity for destruction. Anna wondered, as everyone had back in September of 2001, what else was coming.

  When Christopher finally called, it surprised her how relieved she was just to hear his voice. “Where are you?”

  “GW Parkway. I’m headed back over to see Martin,” he said. “I wonder if you could join me. I’m taking an idea in to him. Can you get away?”

  “If you want me, sure. I just sat in on an NSC meeting,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m not entirely certain. But I think things are only going to get worse.”

  “Yes, I’m sure they are,” Anna said. “This is coming too quickly.”

  She listened to the outline of his idea, impressed that he’d already fit so much together. There was an edge of certainty in Chris’s voice, and an urgency. Anna understood that. She didn’t know exactly what had happened. But she knew enough to know that her country was under attack. “Thoughts?” Christopher finished.

  “My thought is that they may actually be giving us an opportunity,” Anna said. “I’d like to be involved if I can.”

  “Good. I was hoping you’d say that,” Christopher said. “See you there.”

  FIFTEEN

  Western Virginia.

  Jake Briggs had been running hills that afternoon. Briggs was between jobs, trying to enjoy some quality downtime with his wife and children. But he was starting to “grow rust,” as an old CO used to call it, feeling a restlessness in everything he did. He’d woken that morning knowing that he had too much time on his hands, and his thoughts kept getting stuck in the same places—regrets, anger, guilt, all the negative garbage that comes with not having a driving purpose to your day.

  He’d finally gone out running, knowing that if he pushed himself hard enough, or long enough, he might be able to sweat away some of those thoughts. For a while, running intervals in the foothills, pumped up on Metallica and AC/DC, it had worked. And now, earbuds out, soaking with sweat in the warm, insect-filled air, Briggs felt revived.

  There was a bright fog over the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west as he came through the thick brush back to their house, feeling grateful again for what he had. Jake Briggs’s children were always the yank at the end of the line, wherever he went, whatever he did. Freedom was an idea with many meanings, like the national flag, but Briggs always defined it in terms of his kids, and what he was leaving for them. No one should be denied the security to raise a family safely, but in many countries, particularly in the Middle East, where Briggs had spent three years of his career, that security didn’t always exist. It was something that bothered him every day.

  He walked in the house dripping sweat. Grabbed a bottle of water from the kitchen, and a towel from the linen closet. He passed the kids watching a video in the living room and stood in the doorway to his wife’s office, sponging his face with the towel. Today was payroll, Donna’s busiest day. But the TV was on in her office. Which was strange: Donna never watched television during the day.

  She didn’t greet him. Didn’t say anything. Then he saw why.

  “What the fuck—?”

  Briggs moved closer, seeing the footage of the Russian president’s plane exploding midair. The Fox Breaking News banner across the bottom of the screen ran: PUTIN DEAD.

  Donna muted the sound and spoke low, so the kids wouldn’t hear. “They were just saying it’s ninety-nine percent certain that he was on board.”

  “Jesus, what happened?”

  “Terrorism, I guess. They don’t know yet.” She handed him his phone. Briggs took it, keeping his eyes on the TV. When he finally looked down, he saw a missed call notification, and a name from his past: Christopher Niles. Briggs knew immediately that the events had to be related; Chris was calling because of the attack on Russia’s president. He had to be.

  Briggs walked down the hall to his own office and returned the call, but got Niles’s voice mail. He began to click through television channels. Watching as the commentators struggled to explain what had no explanation yet.

  When he stopped sweating, Briggs took a quick shower. Then he went into the living room to be with his kids Jamie and Jessie. Wanting to feel normal again for a few minutes, he tried watching the video with them—some animated caveman movie called The Croods. But Briggs couldn’t sit still. He went back outside, walking down the gravel drive to the main road, checking news updates on his phone.

  Briggs was a retired officer with the Navy’s Special Warfare Development Group—known as SEAL Team Six—who now operated a small military contracting business from his home in rural western Virginia. Years earlier, he had run night rescue missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan and helped train his military counterparts in both countries. During his seven-year stint as a SEAL, Briggs had occasionally displayed an independence and defensiveness that had gotten him in trouble. “His idle is set too high,” one commanding officer had written. The word among his superiors became that Briggs had issues with authority, which had been particularly evident during a joint ops with the CIA in Estonia, a job he probably shouldn’t have taken.

  Pushed out of the SEALS a few months later, Briggs returned to Virginia to start his life over. It had been a rough transition. He’d failed in his first contracting venture and went through several months of depression, beating himself up over it. After another false start, Briggs had lowered his expectations and managed to build a small security business from scratch. He now recruited former SEALS and men from its army counterpart, Delta Force, along with other ex-military. He’d even managed to sell his services back to the government a few times, although most of his work these days was far more mundane than hostage rescues. His biggest contract now was providing onboard security for container ships off the coast of Somalia.

  Briggs had met Christopher Niles five years ago on a special op to force Russian-sponsored aggressors out of Estonia, a mission that was never publicized. Niles, the CIA liaison for the SEAL team, was the most focused man Briggs had ever known in the IC, and also among the smartest. Although, to Briggs, that wasn’t saying a lot. Chris Niles had a disciplined, inborne intelligence, a way of cutting through the bullshit, the hypocrisy and bureaucracy. He also knew, as Briggs did, that some rules needed to be broken. And that sometimes it was okay to forget the finer gradations and see a problem in its most basic terms. Terrorism was his favorite example. Briggs had gotten close enough, often enough, to know that terrorists, while technically human beings, were a more primitive species; that their chemical makeup contained the instincts of a barbaric medievalism; and that if those instincts were allowed to survive and flourish, they had the capacity to destroy civilization. Not by ingenuity or force of numbers or any of that, just by sheer dumb tenacity; if they were a
ble to get control of a nuclear weapon, which wasn’t as far-fetched as people thought, then they could win. Terrorism was in a fight with civilization, a war it shouldn’t by rights even be allowed to enter. But Washington didn’t understand that; it didn’t know how to defend itself effectively.

  The assassination in Ukraine was clearly terrorism, although Briggs couldn’t say yet what kind. He knew a little about the Russian president; knew that he’d stolen the equivalent of millions of dollars while in St. Petersburg in the 1990s and gotten away with it; that he’d later steered much more than that—billions—into personal accounts while serving as Russia’s president (and earning an annual salary of about $187,000). But in a culture that rewarded corruption, Briggs didn’t especially fault him for that. He was more bothered by the people who’d died because of his oppressive policies, and in the wars that Russia had fought since 1999, some known by the public, some not.

  “What’s going on?”

  Jake’s son Jamie was in the doorway. He’d wandered away from The Croods, sensing something was up. Briggs felt an impulse to shield his son. Then he thought better of it. Instead, Briggs punched up the sound. “It’s the president of Russia,” he said. Jamie stared, shuffling into the room, his light brown eyes wide, his hair mussed from lying against the sofa pillows. “That was his plane. They blew it up.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Not officially. But, yeah. He’s dead.”

  His boy stared at the screen. It hurt Briggs, seeing him like that, as the cable channel replayed the explosion over and over and over. He thought of something Donna had said, when they’d first started dating, back when she still talked about such things: When we truly love someone, we give them the power to break our hearts. “Who killed him?” Jamie asked.