The Children's Game

by Max Karpov

  “Terrorists.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know. They didn’t want him alive any longer, I guess. Come here,” he said. Briggs grabbed his son and swung him onto his knee, lowering the volume again. He watched his son’s face as he stared at the television, Jamie’s eyes riveted by the replay. Briggs realized: Jamie would remember this afternoon for the rest of his life. He’d remember sitting on his old man’s knee on the day that Vladimir Putin was blown out of the skies over Ukraine. He’d remember the moment. This moment. Right now. Long after Briggs was gone, his son would think back to this warm summer afternoon in Virginia. He would tell people about it. This moment. Right now.

  “Why didn’t they want him to live?”

  “There’s no good way to explain it, Jamie,” Briggs said. “Except some people think he’s a bad man. And I guess they thought he’d become too powerful.”

  “So they killed him?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Who are they?” he asked. “The tear-iss?”

  “We don’t know who they are,” Briggs said, his eyes suddenly tearing up with emotion. Briggs had seen men blown up in battle several times; he’d exchanged last looks with dying soldiers. Those things never went away. But the look on Jamie’s face right now went deeper because it was his own flesh and blood.

  In fact, Briggs had been wondering the same thing as Jamie: Who were these terrorists? Ukrainian rebels? Chechen extremists? It could even be the right wing within Russia, the generals. Or an organized crime group working a contract; or one of Putin’s enemies who’d somehow managed to get a bomb inside the plane. In a country where nearly half of the economy was based on corruption, anything was possible and the truth was hard to know. It was like having The Godfather as a national model.

  “He doesn’t need to see that,” Donna snapped, her voice startling them both. Their heads turned simultaneously to the doorway. Jake muted the sound.

  “He’s all right,” he said lamely.

  “Jacob!”

  Briggs turned it off to make peace. Jamie pouted for a while, storming around the way he did, thrusting his arms out, until Briggs escorted him back to the living room and Jessie and the movie. But none of that interested Jamie anymore, and he kept looking up at his dad as if trying to glean information from his eyes.

  Briggs wondered if Donna would’ve let Jamie watch the planes going into the Trade Towers in 2001. He would have; of course he would. Kids should know what evil looks like. Why not? It was one of his country’s character flaws, he thought, although Donna disagreed. Briggs had never been big on the idea of sheltering kids. Or the everyone-gets-a-trophy mentality. What passed for fairness and equality these days was eroding America’s best qualities, Briggs thought, basic stuff like individualism and the pursuit of excellence. The whole concept of guaranteed “equality” made him nauseous, although Donna didn’t agree with that, either.

  Briggs took the return call from Christopher Niles on the deck, picturing his old colleague: tall, intense, with silver-blue eyes, dark blond hair, an athlete’s build. It struck him as funny—hard to imagine, really—that this former intel officer was a university teacher now, standing in front of spoiled rich kids in a D.C. classroom talking about Russia.

  “You’ve seen the news,” Chris said.

  “Watching it now. What’s up?”

  The sun was low over the trees, a jagged line in the mist. Soft breezes blew across the yard. It felt like a storm coming. “I need your help,” Christopher said. “It has to do with Ivan Delkoff.” The name sent a jolt through Briggs. Chris didn’t repeat it, or offer a lot by way of explanation. But he didn’t have to. The name was enough. “Can you meet me in the morning?”

  “Yeah. Of course,” Jake said. His thoughts had already shifted away from this Virginia countryside to a street in Estonia, and to Delkoff, a huge man, cursed with perhaps the most serious-looking face Briggs had ever seen: long, nearly lipless, with a shaved pate, large nose, and small concentrated eyes. At first, for a few seconds anyway, Delkoff’s size had unnerved him. But they’d ended friendly, even though working for different sides, spending more than an hour together at a restaurant in Narva drinking Estonian beers. Delkoff knew no English, Briggs little Russian or Estonian, but they’d talked in French, Delkoff bragging on his son. He had big hopes for his boy, who was going to become an intelligence officer one day, he said.

  Briggs walked back inside the house and told his wife that Christopher Niles had just offered him a job. Her arms remained crossed. “What’d you tell him?”

  “He wants to meet me tomorrow. I told him I’d be there.” In a heartbeat. He didn’t say that. He didn’t say that he was going to get to work right away, either, digging into his old files on Ivan Delkoff before catching three or four hours’ sleep.

  They stared at the silent TV together, the loop of the explosion still playing behind the pundits’ commentary. “Is it about that?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” Christopher hadn’t said. Not technically. When she looked at him again, he searched for something in his wife’s eyes that resembled approval. He didn’t find it. But this was his family, so that was all right.

  “I guess I’ll find out tomorrow,” he said.

  SIXTEEN

  CIA headquarters. Langley, Virginia.

  Martin Lindgren looked up at Christopher from behind his desk, his eyes flat, his graceful features drained of their vitality. The concerns that had caused Martin to travel all the way to the Cyclades Islands to find him made a lot more sense now.

  “You understand this,” Martin said.

  “Some of it.”

  “Have a seat.”

  The two men eyed each other as Christopher settled. In retrospect, there’d been at least two warning signs that he should’ve picked up on. But what most concerned Chris now, if his assumptions were correct, was that Turov’s operation had an enormous—maybe insurmountable—head start, and the intelligence community probably wasn’t even aware of it. He wondered if he’d be able to sell Martin on his idea, and how tightly the White House was going to keep its reins on this.

  “Anna’s coming to join us, by the way.”

  “Good.” Martin’s face momentarily brightened, as he had expected. Martin appreciated the depth of Anna’s experience and know-how. Plus, he liked her personally.

  “How were your briefings?” Chris began. Martin’s mouth twisted and he shrugged. “You talked about how unlikely this was, I imagine. You talked about all the ways it was wrong.” Martin nodded slightly. “Wrong that the Russian president’s plane didn’t have working missile defenses. Wrong that it was flying over a corner of Ukrainian air space. Wrong that a president obsessed with being in control would have allowed his plane to become that vulnerable.”

  “Okay,” Martin Lindgren said. “And that’s significant because—?”

  “It’s significant because it means Putin wasn’t on board that plane,” Christopher said. “He couldn’t have been.”

  Chris’s old boss looked at him steadily, as if it were taking a while for his words to cross the room. “Except,” Martin said, “all of the reports we’re getting say he was. There’s footage of him arriving on the tarmac. We have good Russian sources saying he was on board.” Their eyes turned simultaneously to the TV across the room, then back to their conversation.

  “Which might end up being the best evidence we’ll get that the president was complicit in this,” Christopher said.

  “You don’t actually know that. You’re speculating.”

  “I’m speculating.” He took a breath, willing himself to sound less certain. Of course he was speculating, but he was angry, because the reports implicating the United States were coming too quickly, as Anna said. And the US’s initial response felt weak, and wrong, as if there were some internal roadblocks he didn’t yet understand. “But I know Andrei Turov. I probably should have suspected this as soon as we had Delkoff’s name. I blame myself for
that.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lindgren frowned, the vertical crease lines emerging between his heavy eyebrows. “How could we have known?”

  “Delkoff was a Russian GRU commander in the Ukrainian war for the past four years,” Christopher said. “He was responsible for shooting down dozens of Ukrainian military transport planes and helicopters. He may have even been involved in blowing up the Malaysia airliner in 2014. MH17. Maybe that’s what got Turov’s attention.”

  Martin shut his eyes for a second, revealing his reptilian eyelids.

  “My guess,” Chris said, “is that they’re going to float this idea that Putin’s dead for another few hours at least, as the general chaos of the story unfolds. Let it generate some international sympathy and outrage. Sometime tomorrow, then, the Kremlin will announce that the president’s alive. They’ll say they plan to vigorously track down whoever did this. Even if they have to chase them into the toilet,” he added.

  Martin allowed a small smile, acknowledging Christopher’s reference to Putin’s famous warning after the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999. “And then—?”

  “By then, the story of US involvement will have gone viral, as it’s already starting to do. Worst-case: We’re talking protests worldwide, flag burnings. Diplomatic freeze-outs. Talk of Russian retaliation.”

  Martin winced in that strange way he had, opening his mouth as if he’d crunched on a piece of sour fruit. “The Russian president wouldn’t have been involved in something like that,” he said.

  “No. I don’t think he was,” Chris said. “I think this is what Turov calls a parallel game. He advances the Kremlin’s agenda by doing things the Kremlin can’t do itself, for obvious reasons. My theory is, Turov took this plan to the president. The president listened. He wasn’t involved. Except he allowed it to happen.”

  “By not boarding that plane.”

  “That’s what I think. Maybe they’ll say his security services intercepted a last-minute warning that the US, or Ukraine, was planning an attack. Or some emergency caused Putin to miss the flight. I don’t know. Obviously, it will be difficult to prove. They’ve got plausible deniability. And in the meantime, we get blamed, our credibility takes a huge hit. Russia wants us to be perceived as what they actually are: a country not constrained at its highest levels by the law or by a sense of morality.”

  “Someone else had to be involved, though,” Martin said. “The pilot or air traffic control, someone who would have put the flight on that route.”

  “That’s what we’ll need to find out.”

  The desk phone buzzed, interrupting them. Anna Carpenter had arrived.

  Martin Lindgren stood to greet Anna, putting on his charming face, kissing both cheeks and holding her hands before sitting down again.

  “The victims of the crash included a Chinese human rights advocate, I just heard,” Anna told them. “And an interior minister who’d been quietly critical of the president for some time.”

  “Convenient,” Chris said.

  Martin reached for his tea, his eyes staying with Anna. “What else do we have?”

  “I just sat in on an NSC meeting,” she said. “There’s clearly a division within the administration over how to respond. And how we respond, needless to say, is a big part of their calculation.”

  Martin nodded, still watching her.

  “In the plus column,” Chris said, “which is a very small column at this point: I think Delkoff’s involvement may give us an opening. If there’s a weak link in this, it’s probably him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of who he is. I’m going to make some assumptions here,” Chris said. “Ivan Delkoff may be the only person who could have made this happen. Delkoff knows eastern Ukraine, the checkpoints, the duplicitous players, the weapons traders. He’s probably dealt with this Hordiyenko and knows the anti-Putin forces there. Supposedly, he’s even become sympathetic to some of them lately, turning against the president.”

  “But then Delkoff wouldn’t have become involved unless he really thought he was killing the president,” Anna said.

  “Exactly,” Chris said. “Which is why Turov would have made sure Delkoff was killed, either during the operation or immediately after. That’s my second assumption.”

  “How many assumptions are you making?” Martin asked.

  “Four.”

  “Okay.”

  “Third assumption: Delkoff’s going to anticipate that and plan an escape. He’s resourceful, stubborn, and egotistical. He’s going to think that he can outplay Turov and the Kremlin’s intelligence services. Which maybe he can, for a while. But—assuming he’s still alive—he’s going to find out soon that Turov has used him and double-crossed him. And he’s probably going to want some sort of revenge.

  “That’s my fourth assumption. And that’s where we may be able to capitalize on a weakness in Delkoff: his fanatic brand of patriotism.”

  “Go on.”

  “Delkoff once told a Russian journalist that he admired Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb whose assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 set off World War I. He wants to be known for playing a role in Russian history. He doesn’t want to be a footnote. And I think that will work to our advantage. Either way—whether he’s alive or dead—I suspect Delkoff may leave behind evidence implicating Turov. And—if we’re lucky—the Kremlin.”

  Lindgren sighed through his nose, not quite with him. “I should tell you,” he said, glancing at Anna, who was attentively taking in their conversation, “I sat with the president and the national security adviser for a few minutes this afternoon, and they’ve already got good intel on this. And their explanation isn’t what you’re telling me. Not at all.”

  Chris raised his eyebrows, pretending to show concern. Good, he thought.

  “They have intelligence tying this back to a missile commander from the Ukrainian security services,” Martin said. “A man named Kolchak. But they think the order probably came from the Russian military. There are reports that at least two of the men involved have already been killed and ID’d at a checkpoint in Ukraine.”

  “Okay.”

  “I brought up Turov’s name and the response was underwhelming,” Martin added. “The Russian Ops Desk doesn’t believe it. The national security adviser doesn’t think he’s involved. There are even some stories, evidently, that Turov is gravely ill or dead.”

  Chris frowned so that he wouldn’t smile. “Turov’s not dead. But it doesn’t surprise me he’d put that story out. They never took Turov seriously enough, as you know. The White House seems to be playing this exactly as he wants.”

  “And so—what are you suggesting?”

  Chris took a long breath, and thought of downtown Moscow: the lights and traffic along Tverskaya Street, the ripe scent of the Moskva River, the spicy-doughy aromas from the Georgian restaurant near his old office. “Does your offer still stand?”

  “I don’t know. Did I make one?”

  “In Greece you said, quote, I’m not talking about a team of four or five at this point,” Chris said. “I took that to mean an offer might be coming at some future point.”

  “To do—?”

  “I want to go over and track down Turov,” he said. “And have someone else go after Delkoff. Either to find him or, if he’s not alive, to find what he left behind.”

  “Okay,” Martin said, tentatively. “And what will you do if you find Turov?”

  Chris said nothing at first. He was still working through the details. “I think I can get Turov to talk with me,” he said. “Maybe to deal. Turov’s an extraordinary strategist, as we know. An extraordinary man, in some ways. But it’s the ordinary parts of him that interest me.”

  “Go on.”

  “His operation has been a success so far,” Chris said. “But he’s going to have to share that success with the president. And eventually that will become a problem, given their personalities. I can maybe hasten the process along.” He glanced at Anna, knowing t
hat Martin still wasn’t with him. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he continued. “Maybe I won’t be able to get anything. But even if I don’t, we’re only talking about a two-man op. And this is what your division does. Right?”

  Martin smiled mysteriously, glancing at Anna again. “And here I thought you wanted nothing more to do with Turov,” he said. “I thought you wanted to put him behind you.”

  “I did. Then the plane happened. I see what this is now.”

  Martin’s assent was all in his eyes. Chris wasn’t ready to lay out all the specifics of what he was thinking. He wasn’t ready to tell him about what he considered his “secret weapon” in Moscow. But he knew Martin wasn’t expecting that. Instead, he explained his idea in general terms. Martin listened, pretending to be slightly more skeptical than he was. And when he finished, he could see that Martin would go for it—some permutation of it, anyway—as long as he kept it small, and it didn’t interfere with what the White House was doing. “I already have someone to help with Delkoff,” he said.

  “‘Someone’?”

  “Jake Briggs.” Martin showed his sour-fruit grimace. “I know. But the thing is, Briggs has a bead on Ivan Delkoff. I just spoke with him. He worked with him before, an operation in Estonia five years ago. Believe me, the HUMINT on Delkoff will be worth more than anything we’re going to get out of Fort Meade.”

  Briggs is also a wilder breed of soldier, unpredictable and a little crazy, and we may need that to get to Delkoff, Chris thought.

  “Just you two.”

  “There’s weakness in numbers,” Chris said. “Right?”

  Martin allowed a brief smile. “And what would you need?”

  “Transportation, cover, a weapon for Briggs. A G-5 to bring us home would be nice. That’s all. Five, six days tops. Frankly, I don’t think we’ll have the luxury to go that long. You see what’s happened in just the past four hours.”

  “You want to run it black, independent of the IC,” Martin said.

  “I think we’d have to.” It was what Martin wanted, too, of course; it was what AS Division did. Alternate Scenarios. But Martin was playing this a little coy, seeing how revved up Chris was.