by Max Karpov
Returning to the back seat of the SUV, Delkoff felt enormously foolish. Too foolish to speak. He thought of his son’s charred face and felt himself beginning to cry. Artem raced the SUV into traffic, driving too fast to compensate for whatever was wrong.
The magnitude of the betrayal was unfathomable. Andrei Turov had deceived him in a way that Delkoff had not even considered possible. And the worst part was the question that kept repeating in his head as he stared numbly at the passing French towns: Had Delkoff actually been working for the man he thought he was going to kill, then? Had the August 13 attack been set up by the president himself?
If so—if Delkoff’s mission hadn’t been for Russia, and the greater good—then Delkoff was no better than a hired killer. They sped in silence through the darkening night, the fastest vehicle on the freeway, Delkoff drinking again, his window opened an inch for the cool air.
Somehow, we’ll get through this, he began to tell himself as they drew nearer to the coast. Somehow, he’d endure this betrayal the way he had endured physical and emotional challenges all his life; he’d endure it the way any soldier did. Delkoff had seen most of the ways that men were diminished by war; he’d seen tough, wounded soldiers crying for their mothers on the battlefields of Chechnya and Ukraine; he’d seen separatist fighters in the Donbas raping a dead Ukrainian woman in a farmhouse once, laughing because there were others to share the experience; and he’d seen his son’s face, like a mask from some American horror movie, the features all burned off. Whether war finally ruined you or made you stronger, it always changed you. If you were lucky and brave enough, in time the bad made you good. It maybe even made you immune to the smiling dishonesty of the world, and made you think that nothing could get to you anymore. Delkoff had thought that on occasion.
But here was something that had: Andrei Turov, Russia’s “dark angel,” had completely outplayed him with his dark magic. August 13 had been the opposite of what Turov told him it was. It had been an operation to strengthen the president, not kill him.
Delkoff had never believed that Andrei Turov would simply let him go. That’s why he’d planned an elaborate escape. But he didn’t think Turov was lying to him, either, when he’d said, in his candid voice, “You are the only one who can do this successfully.”
On the two-lane coast road they passed sand-dune beaches and rock pools. Half a dozen seaside towns whipped by, the air windy and smelling of sea brine. But Delkoff barely noticed. Not until Artem pulled off onto a rough gravel-dirt road, stopping by a tiny restaurant on a hill. The terrace was lit with a string of colored Christmas lights.
Dmitri turned to face his cousin. “I’m just going in to buy a bottle of wine. I’ll be right out.” Artem left the engine running.
Delkoff lowered the window, beginning to feel a little better. He gazed at the old couples sitting at small tables on the terrace and it felt very inviting to him, a warm, civilized slice of the world. Artem, he saw, was watching him in the rearview mirror.
Dmitri returned with his bottle of red wine and they continued into the darkness away from the coast. Delkoff saw where they were headed: a porchlight in the rolling country, a two-story restored stone farmhouse on a property owned by Dmitri’s ex-wife’s family. He saw the shapes of a barn and a smaller stone house behind it as Artem parked. “Here we are,” Dmitri said. “This will be your home now for a day or two.”
Delkoff was silent. He followed Dmitri inside. There was an old-wood, slightly moldy smell in the house. Delkoff took his duffel bag and vodka upstairs to a small corner bedroom with a beamed ceiling. He closed the door and opened the windows, tuned to the silence and to his own thoughts.
By that point, Delkoff was beginning to formulate a plan: Turov was the enemy now, and Delkoff’s most effective move would be a direct strike on Turov’s vulnerability, an attack that Turov would not anticipate. Delkoff knew how to do that.
Once he’d decided on the basic details, Delkoff went downstairs to tell his cousin. Dmitri and Artem were in the living room, watching the news on RT Français.
“Come outside with me for a minute,” Delkoff said to Dmitri.
They walked together across the scrubby field, Delkoff breathing the grassy freedom of country in the freshening night air, savoring what he had now in his head.
Artem stepped out too, watching them from the doorway.
“We can’t stay here. You know that,” Delkoff said. Stopping, he tried to pass his cousin the vodka; Dmitri wouldn’t take it.
“That was never the plan,” Dmitri said. “We can still travel to Germany tomorrrow.”
Delkoff shook his head. He looked up, and pointed at the sky.
“You know what those are, Dmitri?”
“What do you mean—the stars?”
“No. Some of them are stars. Some of them aren’t stars.”
Dmitri’s wide forehead creased as he gazed up. “What are you talking about?”
Delkoff took a drink of vodka. He screwed the lid back on. “Some of them are stars and some of them are satellites. It wouldn’t surprise me if some were watching us right now.” They both looked at the canopy of stars. “But you know what? I have something more valuable than anything they have now, Dmitri. Right here.”
He tapped the side of his head. His cousin didn’t understand at first.
“There’s enough right here to bring down the president of Russia, if I wanted to, Dmitri, you know that? And I do want to. I’ve decided. I need to borrow a computer. Do you have one I can use?”
“Of course.”
He told him the rest as they walked back to the house, their boots crunching across the dirt and gravel.
“I’m going upstairs and I’m going to write for a while. When I finish, we can make a decision about tomorrow.”
Delkoff set up his cousin’s computer on a small wooden table against the wall. Then he began to write, pecking at the keys of the Cyrillic keyboard with his index fingers, like an accountant punching numbers on an adding machine. What he was creating would be Delkoff’s official account of what had happened on August 13 and what had led up to it. A confession, in effect, although he preferred to call it his “Declaration.” That was the word he typed at the top of the first page. A “Declaration” that would implicate not only Andrei Turov, but also Vladimir Putin, in the attack on the presidential plane. Which was really an attack on the West. He understood that now.
His feelings of anger and humiliation were outweighed by a compulsion to do right. Delkoff felt a surge of excitement every time he recognized what he was doing: creating the historic record of August 13. It was even possible that he could sell this document to the Americans.
As he wrote, Delkoff began to understand a deeper truth, and it humbled him: the assignment that Andrei Turov had handed him back in April wasn’t his destiny, as he’d thought at the time. But this was. The air cooled and moistened as he worked, the smells of hay and sea water thickening as the window curtains puffed out with the breeze, an eerie, gentle sensation that reminded Delkoff for some reason of coming to the Black Sea as a boy, and watching the great Russian Navy ships from the docks. Delkoff didn’t sleep much at night anyway, so he was pleased to have this new mission before him.
But at 9:50, he saw that he was about to run out of vodka, and the vodka was helping him write. Delkoff walked downstairs to ask his cousin if there was any more in the house. Dmitri and Artem were still watching the news.
“We don’t keep vodka here,” Dmitri told him.
“Then we’ll have to go out and get some.” He held up the nearly empty bottle.
“We can’t. Not this late.”
Delkoff looked at the clock on the mantel. “What about your friend at the restaurant?” he said. “Won’t he sell us a bottle?”
“He might.” Dmitri looked at him disapprovingly.
“Then let’s go.”
“You can’t leave.”
But Delkoff didn’t want to stay. Not tonight. Dmitri pulled on his old j
acket and the three of them went out again: Artem driving the SUV back up the gravel road toward the coast. Delkoff in the back seat again, breathing the sea breeze, the taste of alcohol a desperate but delicious craving. It wasn’t smart being out like this, he knew, but Delkoff didn’t care. The world’s horizons seemed enormous again.
He agreed to stay with Artem in the car as Dmitri went in the little restaurant. Delkoff let the window down. He listened to the ocean. Artem’s eyes were watching him again in the mirror.
“You smell that?” he said to Artem.
“Smell what?”
“French air,” he said. “Not like the air in Russia.”
Artem lifted his nose and turned his head slightly. Delkoff was amused by the way his giant nostrils quivered. “Smells the same to me,” he said.
Watching stars over the Channel, Delkoff imagined what was coming. Imagined his enemy, Turov, the Russian coward, the president’s lapdog. What he really wanted now was to contact the Americans. That was his future now: across the ocean.
It was a great surprise, then, when Dmitri came out of the restaurant carrying—along with a liter of vodka and a bottle of red wine—an envelope with a message for Delkoff.
Somehow, despite Delkoff’s months of planning, and his carefully worked-out exit from Ukraine, the Americans were already a step ahead of him.
The Americans, ingenious as they occasionally were, had already been here and managed to leave Ivan Delkoff a message.
PART II
THE FOURTH MOVE
TWENTY-FOUR
Washington.
Two days after the attack on the Russian president’s plane, anti-US protests flared up in Moscow and St. Petersburg, a reaction to the suddenly widespread belief that the CIA had supported or planned the attack on Russia’s president. Fueled by aggressive social media campaigns and unsubstantiated news stories, the protests also seemed to stir long-simmering hatreds of the United States around the world.
Russian journalists paraded out stories about America’s past bungled attempts to kill world leaders—Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and many others—and the US’s record of killing civilians during brutal military campaigns, from Japan to Vietnam to Iraq.
“History,” one Russian commentator noted, “is finally catching up with America’s conception of itself. It should come as no surprise that a country founded on the genocide of its Native American population wouldn’t think twice about ordering the assassination of the president of Russia if they felt threatened enough by him. Fortunately, for Russia and the world, America has finally been caught—and will at last be punished for its legacy of crimes.”
Reports from Russia continued to warn that “additional US attacks” might be imminent, possibly “against civilians,” both in Russia and in “countries with Russian interests.”
The evidence of US involvement in the downing of the presidential plane appeared to gain legitimacy on Sunday with a splashy, but sketchy, story online about a trail of emails between Dmitro Hordiyenko, the Ukrainian arms supplier, and a senior CIA officer named Gregory Dial. “The Hordiyenko Connection,” tweeters called it. The report also alleged a transfer of five million dollars to Hordiyenko from an offshore account controlled by a CIA front company.
“The American Fall,” read the headline of a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday, playing off “Arab Spring,” a forecast some Russian academics had been predicting for years: American democracy was in trouble, the story claimed, the United States in danger of breaking into separate pieces under the ordeal of political, racial, and economic conflicts.
The virulence of the anti-Americanism took many at home by surprise, although others seemed to welcome it. Protests tapped a current of distrust some Americans felt toward their own government. Early Monday morning, the words “USA Kills” were spray-painted on the front wall of the Lincoln Memorial. The site was closed for hours, covered behind tarps while the graffiti was blasted off. But a photo of it went viral, and the image, with the seated figure of Abraham Lincoln in the background, became a symbol for the new anti-America movement. A large, seemingly spontaneous protest errupted later that day on the National Mall.
The stories linking the US to August 13 felt like calculated fabrications to Anna Carpenter. But she was angered by the White House’s official silence about them, and by the political infighting—among elected officials and, even more rabidly, media pundits—over what had actually happened and what to do about it. On Sunday evening, the White House chief of staff called Anna to ask if she would go on television Monday to talk about the attack. By this point, the protests seemed like early volleys in a war against the United States, fought with stories instead of weapons. Anna was glad to help.
On the Today show Monday, Savannah Guthrie asked her: “Senator, let me begin by posing the question Americans are asking this morning: Did we do this?”
“Absolutely not,” Anna Carpenter said. “The United States does not assassinate world leaders—”
“Although you can’t deny that there have been government-sponsored assassination attempts in the past—Fidel Castro, as just one example. These have been well-documented—”
Anna winced privately, having walked into that one. “If you’re asking me to defend something that happened more than fifty years ago,” she said, “I can’t. But if you’re asking me did we have anything to do with the attack on Friday, I will. This goes against who we are as a nation. And I would point out that there is no credible evidence—”
“But at the same time, people do believe this, don’t they, Senator? I mean, you’ve seen the reports: we hear that there was talk within the CIA and at the Pentagon for weeks of a quote preemptive strike on Russia. And a plan that would leave ‘no US fingerprints.’ And now, there are new reports of leaked emails, linking the CIA with this Ukrainian oligarch—”
“Savannah, it’s important to understand that most of these so-called ‘reports’ originate with the Russian media. They have in Russia a sophisticated propaganda apparatus, including troll factories and bot generators. Troll factories are, basically, opinion factories. They fabricate pro-Russia opinions and circulate them over the Internet. I think it’s possible we’re underestimating what effect some of that is having—”
“So, just to be clear: You’re saying these allegations are fabrications? That the CIA never even talked about a preemptive strike against Russia?”
“I don’t believe it was ever discussed seriously, no. Frankly, I think we’ve been caught off guard and we’re spending time now talking about the wrong things.”
“So let me ask you, Senator: who was responsible for the attack, if not the United States?”
“That’s what the investigation is for, Savannah,” Anna said. “I don’t think speculating at this point is useful.” She was tempted to tell her what she did believe: that Russia itself was behind the attack on the president’s plane, that it had been devised to have the very effect it was having. But not now. Anna didn’t have the foundation to make that claim publicly. And it would have been insensitive to the families of the twenty-six people who were killed. Telling the truth about what had happened wasn’t her business. Not yet.
On Tuesday, the story changed again, with an op-ed in the Washington Post by a former US ambassador to the United Nations. Titled “1991, American-style,” it compared the United States to the Soviet Union more than a quarter century earlier. The op-ed, released Monday evening, became Topic A on Twitter and the cable news shows Tuesday morning. And suddenly, the media were teeming with stories about secession—as Jon Niles had predicted in his blog—suggesting that the secession movement in Texas could spark a national trend, catching fire in the manner of same-sex marriage and marijuana decriminalization. “If it ever comes to that,” Texas’s governor told Norah O’Donnell on CBS This Morning, “Texas’s energy resources and independent electrical grid make us uniquely situated to
operate as a stand-alone entity.” He cited surveys showing that most eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in the state identified themselves as “Texans first, Americans second.”
In her first interview of the day, on Morning Joe, Anna was asked to respond to the secession story, which struck her as an irrelevant distraction. “Leaving aside the question of whether secession is legal or not,” she replied, “which, based on the Supreme Court’s ruling, it is not—I don’t think it’s realistic. I think it’s just more premeditated hysteria in the wake of last Friday’s tragedy—”
“But that’s not what I’m asking,” Joe Scarborough said. “Just stay with the editorial, Senator: do you think it’s possible secession will gain a foothold in this country?”
“I don’t believe so, no,” Anna replied. “Although the fact that you’re asking me, and we’re having this conversation—”
“So you dismiss the comparisons to 1991, when the Soviet Union broke apart into sixteen separate nations.”
“I don’t see a comparison, no,” Anna said. “We’re held together in this country by ideas that didn’t exist in the Soviet Union then, Joe, and don’t exist in Russia today. We’re an open, competitive society; they were a closed society and are increasingly becoming that way again.
“We’re not a perfect union, by any means, but when we do make mistakes we have a system that shines a light on them and holds people accountable. There are other countries—and to a disturbing degree Russia is chief among them—where that light has been snuffed out. But there’s a more general accountability that comes with that. It’s up to all of us to pay attention. If our democracy is being threatened, the first thing we need to do is recognize that threat. Being silent is often the same as being complicit.”
Anna realized as she walked off the set that she probably sounded more strident than she intended. But she felt good, buoyed by her belief that the US’s system—the world’s oldest democracy—still worked better than any other, despite its flaws. Coming through the midday D.C. traffic back to Capitol Hill, Anna scrolled down her messages and saw that the early response was mostly positive. Some tweeters thought she was setting the stage for a presidential run, which was the last thing on her mind.