The Children's Game

by Max Karpov

  Chris lay awake afterward again, feeling a little better than he had after their talk on Sunday. But their life together felt faraway again, a boat against the current . . . He thought of Anna’s steady eyes on the beach in Greece as he’d walked toward her from the sea, ready for their long-delayed “conversation”; the way she reached for his hand without hesitation as they strolled through the village in the afternoon, and how they had talked themselves to sleep that night, lying in the dark with the windows open . . . But eventually Chris’s thoughts drifted back to Andrei Turov. If his instincts were wrong and he didn’t hear back from Turov tomorrow, or the next day, then this job would be nothing more than an aborted two-man black ops mission. Chris would write a report, it would be filed away, and he would get on with his life at the university. It was SOP for Martin’s division, anyway: consider scenarios no one else was looking at. Being wrong was built into its charter.

  But there was another idea that Christopher began to entertain as he lay in this nineteenth-century-style Russian hotel room waiting for sleep. An idea that had first come to him in Greece, what seemed like the small voice of his wilder instincts: what if the meeting with Petrenko in London had been a part of Turov’s deception? What if the real reason he was in Moscow tonight was that Turov had called him here?

  There was no empirical evidence to support the idea—or even much logical rationale for it. Except that Christopher knew how Turov’s mind worked. It would be interesting to see what happened tomorrow.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Tuesday, August 17. Moscow.

  He ate a small, late breakfast in the elegant Moskovsky Hall dining room, with its panoramic views of Red Square. Afterward he crossed the Patriarchal footbridge to the magnificent Cathedral of Christ the Savior, stopping midway across the Moskva River to take in the view. It was stunning in the late-morning light: the Kremlin in one direction, the three-hundred-foot statue of Peter the Great in the other. Cathedral of Christ the Savior was the largest church in Russia and the tallest Orthodox Church in the world. It had, like much of Moscow, a strange and broken history: constructed originally in the nineteenth century, the cathedral was destroyed by Stalin in 1931 to make way for a grand Palace of the Soviets, which Stalin envisioned as an enduring monument to socialism. But, for various reasons, Stalin’s palace was never built. In the fifties, Khrushchev turned the site into the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool. In the late 1990s, with the Russian Orthodox Church in ascendance, the cathedral was rebuilt, resembling in nearly every detail the building Stalin dynamited in 1931.

  Christopher spent half an hour marveling at the interior rooms of the Cathedral—the marble chapel, the frescos, the shrines of the Temple—making sure that by 11:20 he was in the gift shop. He selected two books about the church’s history and a medallion to take home to Anna. As he was paying at the register he spotted Amira Niyzov lingering by the exit, wearing a long skirt and thin black sweater, which seemed to blend with her untamed black hair.

  “Want to get lunch?” he said, his eyes adjusting as they came out onto the street alongside the river. The clouds were white and glowing with sunlight. “My treat,” he said. “You choose the restaurant.”

  Amira Niyzov was a slight woman in her early forties with large brown eyes and hollow cheeks that gave a false sadness to her face. “So you are a history professor now,” she said, as they walked the narrow stone street to the restaurant.

  “Teacher, actually. Guest lecturer.”

  “Teacher, then. And we have a common interest again after all this time,” she said, speaking with her precise diction and cultured English accent.

  “Do we?”

  “You’re here writing about the Russian Orthodox Church.”

  “Ah, yes.” Chris smiled. It was possible sometimes to miss the trace of humor in Amira’s words. Outwardly, she was a waif, but there was a tough, unyielding quality at her core. Fifteen years ago Amira had been active in a now-defunct liberal political party—back when Russia still had real political parties—and she’d been friends with Anna Politkovskaya, the courageous—reckless, some said—opposition journalist who’d been shot dead in her apartment elevator in 2006. Amira had always been careful, in her way. Raised a modest, moderate Muslim, she had distanced herself as a teen from her parents’ religion, using journalism to cultivate broader interests in religion, politics, and Russian culture. She’d been through a bad marriage and a divorce, but it was part of her life that she didn’t talk about, as if it had never happened. Even when she was politically active, Amira always presented herself first as a culture and religion writer, an objective journalist.

  Chris hadn’t spoken to Amira in three years, but they’d remained connected by a bond of respect and occasional emails. And by something else: a shared understanding of who Andrei Turov really was and what he could do. In the late 2000s, Amira had briefly pursued Turov, intending to write a story on his donations to the Orthodox Church. Turov agreed to meet with her at his Moscow office. But then he’d insisted that she not write about him, claiming that he wasn’t important enough. Amira accepted that, but didn’t believe it. Her real interest in Turov was the same as Chris’s: the secret work he did for Russia’s president, not his donations to the church. Later, they would compare notes, although she had made the unusual request that they never use Turov’s name in any of their conversations. He became “the crow,” because “crows are an especially smart bird, and he is that,” she’d said.

  The fact that she had accepted Chris’s invitation to meet today told him something, although he wasn’t sure what. Amira was living under cover now, in a sense, abiding by the country’s increasingly restrictive rule book.

  He opened the door and they entered the small, familiar Georgian restaurant, taking a table in a private, parlor-like room by the front window. A waiter brought them a pot of tea.

  “It’s not such a good time to be an American in Moscow, is it?” Christopher said, after they ordered—pelmeni, dumplings filled with onions and mushrooms, borscht soup. “Both of my interviews canceled yesterday. You aren’t worried about meeting me?”

  “To talk about the church? No, of course not,” she said, her eyes staying with his. “It’s become an important topic in Russia. I’m happy your country has at last taken notice.”

  “It’s interesting how things have changed, though,” Chris said. “In the eighties, going to church was how you stood up to communism. Now, the church seems almost a branch of the state.”

  Amira looked away. “It’s true,” she said. “Ninety-five percent of the churches in Moscow were destroyed in the twenties and thirties. Communism left us an atheist country for seventy years. But over the last two decades, 23,000 new Orthodox churches have been built. And seventy percent of Russians now call themselves Orthodox Christians.”

  “Quite a role reversal,” Christopher said.

  “Yes.”

  Chris glanced out the window and recognized the same stocky man he’d seen following him on Tverskaya Sunday night. “The only reason we adopted ‘In God We Trust’ as our motto in the 1950s, you know, was to draw a line between our country and yours,” he said.

  “Yes, I think the line’s still there, we’ve just sort of switched sides.” Amira reached for her tea. There was an ambiguous, slightly off-kilter quality about her that he liked.

  It felt safe sparring with Amira about the church, and they carried it on through the meal, discussing the United States’s drift toward political correctness, its legalizing of same-sex marriage, and Russia’s ambition to become a “traditional values society,” the moral alternative to the West. Amira spoke with a professional detachment, causing Chris to wonder if maybe she had missed his email reference to the “crow” and really was here just to talk about the church.

  They were finishing their meal when he pointed to a man holding an English language paper outside. In the headline, he saw the words “No Fingerprints” in quotes.

  “The news is all about last F
riday now, isn’t it?” he said, in a quieter tone. “It’s going to make your president more popular than ever, I’d imagine.” Amira shrugged a perhaps. “And make things tougher for the opposition.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no.” They were testing each other, Chris sensed, circling the topic for a way in. But this was where he needed to go, if just briefly: there was a network of opposition forces that was still very much alive in Russia, waiting for something to join them together and light them up again. Amira was a link to that network. There was also a shadow society in Russia, sponsored by the exiled businessman and Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. His Open Russia foundation had for months been recruiting political and business leaders who—in theory, at least—could take over when the current regime finally toppled, although no one expected that to happen soon.

  “You planned to write about him. Several years ago,” Christopher said. “The crow.”

  Amira moved her hand dismissively on the table. “There wasn’t much to write. He convinced me he was like hundreds of others in Russia. I never saw a story there.”

  In fact, no one had ever written a story on Turov, as far as Christopher knew. “Supposedly, there’s been some kind of falling out now with the Kremlin?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe he just wanted to retire. Actually, what I hear is that he’s concerned about his family. About nevyezdniye. Do you know what that is?”

  “It’s the policy that prohibits people with access to state secrets from traveling to countries that have extradition treaties with the US, isn’t it? Something like that?”

  “Something like that,” she said, a subtle smile briefly lighting her face. “Four million Russians are on the list now. He’s very much a family man. He’s more concerned for them, I suspect, than for himself.” Chris could see that she was privately energized by this turn in the conversation. She leaned forward, adding, “You think he had something to do with last Friday?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “The story I’m told, and it’s well-sourced, is that the missiles were Ukrainian military. Purchased by Hordiyenko for a private militia. The missile battery was seen in Ukrainian territory that day. Last Friday. There are supposedly photos that match up.”

  “Yes, most of that’s been reported,” Chris said. “But where did the backing come from? Who ordered it?”

  “Well. From what I’m reading, it came from Washington.” She gave him a calculated look, not quite smiling. “Why? What do you think?”

  “What I think,” Chris said, “is that the crows always return to the cornfield. Metaphorically speaking. I think the whole thing could’ve been pulled off with a very small number of people—ten, maybe. Only three or four of whom knew what they were really doing.”

  “And one of those three or four—?”

  “Had to be the top, yes,” he said, meaning the Russian president.

  Amira drank her tea and set the cup in the saucer. She took her time responding. “Even if that’s true, it would be almost impossible to prove.”

  “I understand that,” Christopher said. He glanced outside and then leaned closer. “But my question is: What if you had some evidence? Theoretically. Could you do anything with that?”

  Her dark eyes gleamed with a new interest, but in the next moment she looked away. Chris knew that Amira blamed the Russian president for the loss of several good friends in the opposition movement. But she wasn’t stupid. Everyone knew that the Russian president’s loudest critics had short life expectancies. “Theoretically, I would be skeptical,” she said, her voice a whisper. “Because, even if true, there’d be layers between the crow and those who carried it out. Just as he keeps layers from his business with the Kremlin. That’s how he’s survived.”

  “Until now, anyway,” Chris said. “But what if one of those layers contained the details about what actually happened?” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “If you had those details, you would still have access to the network, right?”

  Amira didn’t answer right away. “What do you have?” she said finally.

  “Right now, nothing. But it exists. If I were able to broker something, would you be interested? Or would it just put you in jeopardy?”

  “That depends.” She watched Chris more closely now. This was the crux of it, he knew; they had to trust each other to move this forward. “Why are you asking?”

  “Because what I’m talking about would be enough to change things,” Chris said. Her eyes quickly scanned the room and returned to his. “To accomplish what some of the people who aren’t alive anymore wanted to accomplish.” He thought of Marina Vostrak—the dour, worried face of his Russian asset, who’d been murdered in Tallinn. And then, for maybe fifteen or twenty seconds, Amira let him in, telling Christopher what he needed to know without saying a word. On the other side of those eyes was a world hidden and protected, still wild, angry and full of possibility; Chris saw what he needed in those twenty seconds. He completed the transaction he’d come here to make.

  “How soon?”

  “Less than forty-eight hours,” he said, hopefully.

  Amira reached for one of the books he’d purchased at the gift shop. She opened and began to page through it, talking to him about the history of Christ the Savior cathedral as Christopher’s watcher walked past the window again. Amira told him how Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture had been written with the cathedral in mind and was first performed there in 1882. How part of the cathedral’s first floor had originally been a memorial commemorating Russia’s defeat of Napoleon. They became slightly more detached as she spoke, but he appreciated what she was doing; it was as if their orbits had brought them close enough to see each other’s faces through the windows of their capsules, and now they were preparing for reentry to their own worlds. At one point, Amira wrote a number inside the book’s back cover, and asked him to use it for future communications.

  When they walked outside, there was a smell of rain in the breeze and a gray starkness to the neighborhood. They walked two blocks before saying goodbye, giving each other a warm hug. Chris felt lifted by the scents of baked bread and laundry—by the connection they’d just made—as he walked back to the National. The operation had depended on the meeting with Amira. And the meeting had gone as well as he had hoped. Better, even.

  The first connection had been Delkoff. He had just made the second.

  Chris returned to the hotel hoping to find a response from Andrei Turov. The third connection. Coming up the elevator he recalled the one time he had met Turov, across a chess table in Gorky Park: Turov ordinary, as he’d heard, only more so, down to the uneven cut of his fingernails, the lowered blue eyes, the modest smile, the stray nasal hairs; you wanted to look around and say, “Who’re you? Where’s Turov?” But Turov was an illusionist. Even his surname was an invention, Chris had learned, taken from a medieval principality in Belarus where, supposedly, his family descended from royal blood.

  When he reached the room there was no response, though. Christopher turned on television, feeling anxious again, imagining where Anna was right now. Where Andrei Turov was. He lay on the bed and closed his eyes, surprised at how tired he felt. Thinking about Amira, the way she had let him into her world for fifteen or twenty seconds. How one person could change a country; how one country could change the world. It’s about waiting now, he reminded himself. Managing time and expectations.

  The trill of his phone startled him.

  Christopher reached for it on the nightstand. Wondering if he would recognize Turov’s voice after four years. The third connection.

  The voice on the other end was familiar. But it was not Andrei Turov’s. And the news it bore was not what Christopher expected. Or wanted to hear.

  THIRTY

  Northern France.

  The Americans’ first contact with Ivan Delkoff came on the evening of August 16: an envelope left in a small seafood restaurant off the coast road. The envelope had actually been left for Delkoff’s cousin, Little Dmitri, who went to
the restaurant in the evenings to drink a pint of ale with the owner and one of the local fishermen. Someone, evidently, had noticed that.

  Dmitri’s nightly habit would be discontinued now that Delkoff was here; he had assured his cousin of that. But on Monday night, he’d come to the restaurant for a different reason: to buy Delkoff a pint of vodka so he could return to the house and finish writing his “Declaration.” It was funny: For months, Delkoff had considered himself a conspirator; now, he understood that he was something else, a witness. His plans were not about survival and concealment anymore; they were about making sure his country’s deceptions became known. And that meant he had to rely on basic rules of combat. If your enemy is stronger than you are, evade him. If your enemy is temperamental, seek to irritate him. If your enemy is a clever coward—as Andrei Turov was—expose him. That was what he was going to do. Delkoff’s initial strategy after August 13 had been escape and evade. He’d planned to use France as his base for two or three days, then he’d travel on to Germany; from there, to South Africa. He had already arranged his accounts so that his family members would be taken care of for the rest of their lives. And so that Delkoff had enough ready cash to avoid leaving an electronic trail.

  Dmitri came out looking sullen, as always, his open hunter’s jacket flapping in the sea air. Delkoff heard the bottles clinking in an old paper sack. They rode inland, dipping into a shallow and coming to the turn with the upside-down rowboat. Dmitri touched Artem’s shoulder, asking him to stop. He turned and signaled Delkoff.

  The two men got out, much as they had on the drive from Paris. Artem stayed behind the wheel with the engine running, watching in the mirror.

  They walked down the road behind the SUV. Then Dmitri stopped and handed him the envelope. “For you,” he said. “Not me. You.” His cousin watched like an angry police sergeant as Delkoff opened the envelope.