by Max Karpov
It took eight minutes for Maya Coles to call back. “Where are you getting that I had something to do with this ‘no fingerprints’ thing?” she said, an edge in her voice. “I assume you were kidding.”
“You know I don’t kid about things like that,” Jon said. It was Maya Coles’s style to get right to business. “Actually, I’m told you were there when it was discussed. And also that you were at this meeting with Hordiyenko, the Ukrainian arms supplier, last month. In Kiev.”
Her silence stretched out. Politically, Coles leaned to the right, like Kettles, but unlike Kettles she was also a staunch defender of the president and his policies.
“I take that as a yes?”
“Off the record?”
“Of course.”
“Where’d you hear about Kiev?”
“So it’s true—you were there?”
“No,” she said, and made a startling throat-clearing sound. “Hey, Jon. Don’t play into this conspiracy crap, okay? There was a meeting but it had nothing to do with assassinating the president of Russia. Don’t be manipulated, honey.”
Jon was scribbling don’t play into conspiracy crap . . . don’t be manipulated, honey. No matter how many times she used the word “honey,” it always felt disconcerting.
“So why are we having this conversation?” he said. “Why is there a conspiracy theory? I mean, there’s something out there that’s scaring the administration. Tell me what it is.”
She laughed loudly, one of her standard deflections. Jon waited. “Okay, here’s a question for you, Jon. And this is just conversation now.”
“Okay.”
“What if a handful of people did have intel about a planned assassination? From within the Russian military, I mean. I’m not saying good intel. But say we had something. And failed to bring it to Mr. Putin’s attention. Is that the same as being complicit?”
I don’t know, Jon thought. But you’re changing the subject. “You didn’t answer my question about the meeting in Kiev,” he said. Maya Coles said nothing. “I understand you were in the meetings in Washington, too, that we talked about before.” More silence. “When this ‘no fingerprints’ idea was first floated.”
“When we put out the hit, you mean?” she said.
“Can I quote you on that?”
“No. Okay, look,” she said. “For starters: I’d be very careful about how you handle that no fingerprints thing.”
What sounded like a garbage truck went by on her end. “You’re not denying it, then.”
“I’m not denying the words ever came up in conversation. As table exercises; war games. But never for real. Maybe if you told me where you heard it, I could elaborate.”
“I can’t give you a name. But I’ve heard about these meetings from several sources.”
“And therein lies the problem,” she said, a muscle of anger again in her voice. “Since reporters are never in the room when these national security issues are discussed, and the information is classified, your stories are by definition based on leaks. And leaks aren’t information. They’re cherry-picked to reflect someone’s agenda. By definition.”
“So help me out, then,” Jon said. “I know there were five people in the room when this ‘no fingerprints’ thing occurred. You were one, I’m told. General Rickenbach was one, Gregory Dial from CIA. Edward Sears from the State Department—?”
This last was a bluff to see how she’d respond. Maya Coles laughed loudly. “Nice try,” she said. “Listen. Jon. Here’s the deal. Since you’re pushing it. I’m willing to tell you the real story, okay? As much as I can—if you agree to verify it elsewhere.”
“Okay.” When she began a statement with “Listen”—rather than her usual “Look”—it meant she was going to tell him something significant. “Listen” also carried a note of sincerity, although it was never clear how sincere her sincerity was.
“Off the record. There’s a big story that’s about to drop, okay? Maybe not the story you guys would like and I’m sorry about that. But a big story. The real story.”
“Go ahead.”
“There’s intel, HUMINT, which you’ll be hearing about very soon—they’re just dotting the i’s right now—about one of the Russian generals. Okay? That’s all I can say. But here’s a prediction: within forty-eight hours, that’s all you guys are going to be talking about. In the meantime, the responsible thing is wait until it’s been vetted. What’s the adage you guys use—better to get it right than get it first?”
“I don’t use that one,” Jon said. “Tell me about this general, though. This is someone within the Russian military who was working with Hordiyenko in some way?”
“That’s what I understand. But you have to source that elsewhere. Okay? Hey, Jon: gotta go. Just remember: it’s more than your own personal glory that’s at stake here.”
“I’ll remember,” he said. Maya Coles clicked off.
Jon opened his computer and typed in his notes from their conversation, pausing several times to watch the “Breaking News” on television—although “Breaking News” was the permanent banner now on all the cable networks, and “breaking news” seemed redundant to him anyway. What did she mean about someone in the administration knowing? Kettles had suggested the same thing. How far within the administration did this go?
When all three news networks were on commercials, Jon wandered into the living room, where he became distracted for a while with Carole’s matchbooks. Carole kept a couple hundred matchbooks in a large fish bowl, an inheritance from her father. Freddie Katz had been a salesman who traveled the US highways in the sixties and seventies, back when people still smoked openly in public. Jon picked through a few of them, imagining an older, more dimly lit version of the country, with cigarette machines and juke boxes, names like Starlite Lounge, Dew Drop Inn, Pine Cone Motel. They made him feel lonesome.
With Carole, he was a little pre-nostalgic now: they hadn’t broken up yet but he was already missing her. He looked at the print of House by the Railroad above the table. Carole liked Hopper’s old houses and window shades, the gleaming slants of sunlight. She loved gothic architecture. Jon preferred Gas and Shakespeare at Dusk, 1935: fading light, encroaching nature, the lack of people.
His cell phone startled him. It was Anna Carpenter calling back.
“Good afternoon,” she said, a buoyant tone that felt contagious. “I read your blog today. I thought maybe we could meet. I suspect we may have some mutual interests.”
“About—?”
“Russia. Noise at the expense of comprehension?”
“Okay.”
“Tell me when you’re free.”
“Okay,” Jon said. “How about now?”
To his surprise, Anna Carpenter accepted. If he could make it downtown, she’d meet him in an hour at the Starbucks on Capitol Hill.
As he drove away toward the city, Jon began to wonder about his brother again. The real reason Anna Carpenter was asking to meet him, he suspected, had to do with Christopher, not Russia, or truth, or noise at the expense of comprehension. It was even possible that Christopher would be there, he realized. But, then again, maybe not. He hoped not.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Moscow.
Christopher Niles knew, as he walked from the plane into Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport Sunday afternoon, that he was under surveillance. He knew, from having worked in Moscow for eighteen months, that the FSB ran surveillance from the observation room in the control tower.
He was arriving as himself: a college teacher researching the Russian Orthodox Church, ahead of a class he was teaching and an op-ed he intended to write. It was his job over the next two or three days to do nothing that would make anyone think otherwise.
It wouldn’t be easy. Russia had grown increasingly wary of Americans since economic sanctions were imposed in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. American embassy staff and their families were now routinely harassed, sometimes in bizarre ways. Diplomats reported Russian agents breaking
into their homes at night, turning on lights, rearranging furniture. One diplomat returned home to find someone had defecated in his living room.
Chris’s task in Moscow was to find and meet with Andrei Turov. He had left messages for him before leaving Washington and was confident that he would call him back. But until then, he’d have to wait and not arouse anyone’s suspicions.
Russia’s intelligence services knew who he was; they knew of his tenure in Moscow. If the FSB wanted, they could pull him in at any time on a pretense—to check his “paperwork,” or for some other contrived reason. They could easily create enough interference to sidetrack the mission. But Chris didn’t think they’d do that. They’d be more interested in following him, hoping his movements would give away the real reason he’d come to Moscow. It presented an interesting challenge.
He had two interviews scheduled for Monday morning, and expected to spend the afternoon at the Tretyakov Gallery, which was home to the finest collection of Russian art in the world. The Tretyakov would be a pleasant diversion. On Tuesday, he would meet Amira Niyzov at Christ the Savior cathedral and take her to lunch nearby. Amira was a prominent Russian online journalist who wrote about culture and religion. She was, he hoped, the “secret weapon” in Christopher’s plan.
He checked in to the elegant Hotel National on Tverskaya Street Sunday evening and found two waiting messages. Both interviews Martin had arranged for Monday had canceled. Stanislov Ryzanov, the Russian Orthodox Church spokesman, left regrets that his schedule now “makes it impossible” to meet, this week or next. His other appointment, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said “circumstances” prevented him from rescheduling. “Circumstances” were August 13, of course.
Chris went for a walk that evening to Red Square, watching sunset wrap around the candy-colored domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. He tried to be just a tourist on his first night, enjoying the grandeur of Red Square, the cool night air and restaurant aromas, not thinking much of Turov. Later, he walked down Tverskaya Street, gazing in the shop windows, his memories stirred by the Cyrillic signs and the stream of traffic thick with SUVs and BMWs, by the grilled kebab aroma from a familiar Uzbek restaurant. Walking was Chris’s favorite recreation, and Moscow had been a city he’d always enjoyed exploring, ever since his first visit in 1996, particularly the medieval streets off the main arteries. But he couldn’t help notice the changes this time. There were many more construction cranes in Moscow than on his last visit, and most of the vendor stalls and kiosks were gone. It was again a city in transition.
There were also changes not visible from a street level. Vladimir Putin had continued to realign the country’s power structure, he knew, giving the security services a stronger role, moving former bodyguards into governorships and top intelligence posts, taking policy-shaping powers away from the Foreign Ministry. In Moscow, the line between Kremlin-sponsored black operations and mafiyas activity had further blurred. And stringent new laws had been passed limiting public protest. Who would have imagined when the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991 that Russia would look like this a quarter century later?
As he walked the narrow backstreets, Christopher fell naturally into surveillance-detection mode—scanning for moving shadows, repeat vehicles, shapes in windows. Eventually—briefly—he got a clear look at the Russian agent who was tailing him: a stocky man with close-cropped gray hair and wide-set eyes.
Chris felt a familiar obsession as he returned to the hotel. When Martin had recruited him last week in Greece, he’d felt wary of returning to work for the US government, afraid he’d be jeopardizing the precious life that he was building with Anna—the sort of life he’d never had before. Tonight, walking through the heart of Moscow, with its enormous, largely hidden deception industry, he didn’t feel that so strongly; tonight he felt as if he were answering a summons. He felt like an athlete, becoming sharper in anticipation of the main event.
Russia’s war on the West had begun here almost invisibly, while the US was looking the other way, focused on Afghanistan and Iraq. Led by an unlikely new president with little political experience, and spurred on by a revitalized petro-economy, Russia had seized the chance to change its destiny. Each year under Putin, the country had increased military spending as it exerted political power in Europe and the Middle East and interfered with the aspirations of its immediate neighbors—particularly those with eyes for the West, such as Ukraine.
Russia’s brutal incursion into Georgia in 2008—the scope of which took US intelligence by surprise, although the conflict had been building for months—should have been ample warning about how far Russia would go to keep its former republics in line. But the US underplayed the threat, despite the forecasts of several analysts, among them Christoper Niles.
Chris spoke with Anna before going to bed on Sunday, playing the role of a college teacher visiting Moscow on a research trip. He knew that the hotel room was fitted with cameras and listening devices. Hearing her voice, he regretted again how Martin’s assignment had separated them, and he lay awake afterward, trying to will himself to sleep, consumed by an emptiness that he couldn’t quite shake. He thought of all the years he’d given to the agency, the precious time he’d spent doing the wrong things. He could never get that time back, of course, but there was a value in understanding those mistakes, he told himself; a lesson for how to live the rest of his life.
In the morning, the bad feelings were all gone. Chris wandered through the medieval side streets near the hotel again. He joined a tour of the five-domed St. Clement’s church, with its glittering Baroque interior, staying to chat afterward with the tour guide. He ate lunch at an outdoor café on Stoleshnikov Lane and then walked to Tretyakov Gallery, where he spent much of the afternoon observing the religious art. Art that Anna would have loved, particularly Rublev’s great Trinity icon in the Hall of Old Russian Art.
Late in the afternoon, he took a cab past his former office, at the American embassy, where a crowd of weary-looking anti-American demonstrators were milling on the sidewalk. Someone had pelted the building with eggs earlier, and no one had gotten around to cleaning it. Upstairs, on the top floor, was where Chris had worked for eighteen months.
Seeing the building stirred contrary emotions, reminding him that he might still be working here if his last job hadn’t gone bad. If he hadn’t discovered details of a Russian disinformation plot against neighboring Estonia, and tried to pass it on to his government. The plot had involved the arrest of an Estonian border guard on charges of espionage and sexual misconduct—then using that arrest as propaganda to inflame anti-Estonia sentiment among the country’s twenty-five-percent-Russian population.
Christopher’s source was a Russian asset named Marina Vostrak, a diplomatic aide he’d begun to cultivate months earlier. Marina wanted to deal, she said, but was becoming nervous about their arrangement. Chris took her concerns to the chief of station, who asked him to wait. They couldn’t risk compromising “a larger case,” the COS said. Several days later, Marina Vostrak went missing. And three days after that, Chris watched the news from his embassy office as an Estonian guard was arrested and the campaign began. He was still waiting to hear about the “larger case.”
Washington’s failure to prevent the Estonia operation was disheartening but hardly surprising. What happened to Marina Vostrak, though, was. The day after the border guard’s arrest, Marina was found strangled to death in a garbage bin in Tallinn. Chris felt worse than devastated; he also felt responsible.
He’d gone to war with the Agency briefly after that, as he had several times in the past. But it was shooting spitballs at a battleship. He’d ended up quitting the government soon afterward, to become an independent contractor. The whole business had cost him income and prestige. But he’d also met Anna, and that made it worthwhile.
The cab carried Christopher past Turov’s headquarters, a kilometer from the US embassy, a nondescript office building where troll and bot factories operated on the six
th floor, he had heard. Turov lived in the country now with his daughter Svetlana and his grandchildren, supposedly. Turov’s gatekeeper, Anton Konkin, lived there too, as did a girlfriend, Olga Sheversky.
He channel-surfed Russian state television that night, searching for an objective discussion about last Friday’s attack. But there wasn’t any. In the more than three years since Chris had last been in Moscow, several of Russia’s best-known journalists had fled the country. Many prominent intellectuals had left as well.
Instead of discussion, he found “news”: more US documents had been leaked, indicating that a Ukrainian SBU officer named Mikhail Kolchak, one of the August 13 “co-conspirators,” had met with American CIA officer Gregory Dial in Kiev last month. Further “evidence,” the news reader said, that the US had been behind Friday’s attack.
The Russian foreign minister was being interviewed on another channel, calling this latest leak “an incredible development” and “a declaration of war.”
“Our president’s high approval ratings show one thing very clearly: that Russians are united,” he said, gesturing like an orchestra conductor. “Americans, needless to say, are not.”
This was Turov’s credibility equation, Christopher knew: Russia gains by August 13, the US loses; they were the same story, two ends of a seesaw. A new, more effective means of warfare. Instead of taking lives and destroying property, which was the old way, you won by simply changing what people thought about the United States.
His cell phone rang. Christopher reached for it and checked the message screen. It was a pre-arranged, coded text from Martin Lindgren: Jake Briggs had just contacted Ivan Delkoff in France.
The first connection was made, then. The second would come tomorrow.
The last thing he did before going to bed on Monday was call Anna. They spoke a little longer this time, and a little less self-consciously. Christopher told her about seeing Rublev’s Trinity icon, how he wished she could have been with him to see the Russian art. It was 2:30 in the afternoon in Washington. Anna was in her tiny unmarked “hideaway” office in the basement at the US Capitol, she told him. She missed him very much.