by Max Karpov
It was a brief note, handwritten in French. Delkoff read it in the moonlight: Turov sait que vous êtes ici. Je voudrais vous aider. Appelez ce numéro. Jake Briggs, USA. “Turov knows you’re here. I want to help. Call this number. Jake Briggs, USA.”
He read it again and passed the note to his cousin. Dmitri looked up at Delkoff when he finished, his mouth parted, as if someone had hit him in the stomach.
“Who the fuck knows you’re here?” Dmitri said. “You know this person?”
“I’ve met him. Several years ago,” he said. “I met him in Estonia.”
Jake Briggs. He did know him. But Delkoff was still trying to form a clear picture. He studied the countryside, the dark wooden houses perched at odd intervals in the moonlight. Was Jake Briggs out there somewhere right now, watching him?
“It’s a trick,” Dmitri said. Delkoff saw the look of concern in his cousin’s face. He understood: no one was supposed to know he was here.
“Call him,” Delkoff said. “Go ahead and call him.”
Dmitri pulled his phone. Artem was outside the SUV now, too, smoking a cigarette, watching. He wasn’t supposed to know about any of this, he was just security. But Delkoff was sure he’d picked up most of it by now. Maybe all of it.
“Ask him a question,” Delkoff said. He felt the fresh breeze from the Channel and became inspired. “If he gives the right answer, we’ll meet him. If he doesn’t, we don’t.” Dmitri remained silent. “All right?” Delkoff said. “Ask him the name of the restaurant, in Narva.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Ask him the name of the restaurant. If he doesn’t know, ask him what beer we drank.”
Dmitri finally did what he requested. Delkoff heard his cousin pushing the buttons. Delkoff stepped away from the road and began to urinate. He watched the stars and the strange, iridescent light in the Channel. He felt the outlines of his son’s medal in his shirt pocket, and thought of Pavel’s willingness, his form of patriotism. He recalled the little crease of smile Pavel would reveal as a boy, glancing shyly up at his dad.
While he finished peeing, Delkoff turned and saw Dmitri walking toward him.
“Antalya Kebab,” Dmitri said, holding the phone on his jacket. “You both had Põhjala.”
Son of a bitch. Delkoff grinned. Yes. “Tell him we’ll meet him in the morning, then. First thing.”
“He doesn’t want that. He wants to meet you tonight,” Dmitri said.
“In the morning. Tell him I’ll call him myself, first thing. Where’s he staying?”
Dmitri relayed his words and then turned back to his cousin. “He says tonight. He wants to talk to you now.”
“No.” Delkoff began to walk back to the car, anxious to return to the document he was writing. It was an odd coincidence: he’d been thinking earlier that he’d do this as a “walk-in” at the American embassy in Paris. Instead, they’d come to him. They’d made it easy.
He looked over his shoulder and saw Dmitri still talking on the phone, facing south now. “Tell him I’m too tired tonight,” he called to his cousin. “First thing in the morning. Eight o’clock. I’ll have something to give him then. A document. Tell him that.”
Delkoff got into the back seat of the SUV and waited, breaking open the liter of vodka. He watched the Channel, thinking that maybe his future lay over there now, across the ocean. He drew on his kaleidoscope of American images: Coca-Cola signs and fast-food restaurants, neon-lit interstates, the Grand Canyon, the Google logo, Marilyn Monroe, Mount Rushmore, the Abraham Lincoln monument, the Empire State Building, and—high up in the California mountains somewhere—the sign: Hollywood.
They rode back to the farmhouse without speaking, Delkov drinking vodka, the SUV bouncing on the gravel road. Dmitri’s silence felt thick with anger; Delkoff’s was a mist of hope. It might’ve been funny, except Delkoff cared very deeply about his little cousin. And he worried about him, as he always had.
He walked up the steps to his room with the bottle of vodka, feeling reenergized, and closed the door. He pulled off his combat boots, sat at the wooden table, and went to work, using both index fingers on the Cyrillic keyboard. Delkoff knew that he needed to keep his story simple. But he had to include all of the pertinent names and details. Because what he wrote tonight would very likely become the official record, an account that would stand up to anything Turov and the propagandists tried to pass off as the truth.
He paused from his work only to drink and, several times, to look at the picture of his son Pavel. When Pavel was a boy, he was often caught in photos looking to the side. Delkoff had tried for a while to startle him out of it. “Hey! Look straight ahead, boy!” he’d say, clapping his hands. But it only embarrassed Pavel and caused him to look down . . . And he recalled something else, a memory of Pavel he’d forgotten: tossing his boy into the lake from the end of a dock when he was five or six years old and Pavel paddling frantically in the steel-colored water, his face like a frightened dog, his eyes darting to his father’s as Delkoff shouted encouragement. God, he loved that boy so much. Why had he let him go to war? Why hadn’t he tried harder to save him?
When he finished his “Declaration,” Delkoff read through it twice, making only a few small revisions and additions. He was very pleased. Then he began to write a more personal account, a record of his own thoughts and feelings as the operation had unfolded. This one was easier, and more dramatic. It might one day be the opening to a book or movie. We felt the ground shaking like divine thunder, he wrote, the great Russian-made rockets bursting out of their launchers, the sensors locking in, chasing the elusive target. This was what we had been hired to do and we all felt enormous pride knowing we were fulfilling the secret destiny of our country. I thought of my son Pavel. He had given his life to this cause of Russia Mir months ago, but he was with us on that afternoon. He was there with his father in the sunflower fields. He was right there, as were all the men who had given their lives to this war. We were all together at last on that afternoon in the brown sunflower fields of the Donbas.
Of course, I still believed at the time that I was working for Andrei Turov, and for the good of the Russian Federation. I did not yet imagine that the Kremlin itself had a hand in this. That they might even be paying my salary. Now, of course, I know. I know many things that I did not know on that clear afternoon.
Delkoff stopped, looking up at the motion of the blowing curtains, filled with a sense of purpose. He could do with words now what the missiles had failed to achieve; he could force the Russian president to face his crimes. Not only that: he could force Russians to see their leader’s deceptions. This was Delkoff’s mission now, to tell the real story about his country. Because if he didn’t, the story would never be told. And then what? Ivan Delkoff would go down as the engineer of a failed attempt on the president’s life, that was all. His role in history would be written by other men and, almost certainly, trivialized. Or, just as bad: he wouldn’t be known at all.
Delkoff finished and decided to take a break, to give his eyes a rest. He lay down on the narrow bed against the wall, still dressed in his fatigues, and immediately fell asleep.
When he woke, the sun was a sharp glare through the glass. Delkoff sat up groggily. The room appeared dusty and unfamiliar. A breeze puffed out the curtains and he smelled sea brine and coffee. Slowly it came back to him: the trip to the restaurant, the note, his mission.
Then he heard what had awakened him: Little Dmitri was in the hallway calling out his name, banging on the door and trying the knob. Had he locked it? It was Tuesday morning, already past 7:30. “Ebat’-kopat’,” he said to himself. Oh, shit. Delkoff unlocked the door and let his little cousin see that he was okay.
“Come down for breakfast. We need to call the American.”
Delkoff nodded and closed the door. He wasn’t okay, really, but he would be. He stuck his head out the window, breathing deeply the morning air. It was a beautiful day. He looked across the grain fields toward
the Channel, blinking at the blue horizon.
He returned to the table and refreshed the screen on his computer. It was still there. His “Declaration.” And the first-person account that accompanied it.
Delkoff began to read what he’d written, but began to have trouble focusing on the sentences. The house felt like it was moving, as if Delkoff were on a ship. He’d forgotten the way vodka could do that, take him on a wild ride through his memories and emotions. And then . . . you wake up, your head’s thumping, and you can’t put together the simplest thoughts. Like: which should come first, breakfast or shower? Delkoff couldn’t decide. He walked to the bathroom first and violently threw up. Then he settled in for a long, hot shower. There was a time, years ago, when this had been his life—when he’d spent every morning just waiting to feel normal again; often, it wouldn’t come back to him until afternoon, and then he was grateful just to be able to think clearly for a couple of hours. The war had pulled him out of that cycle; it was why he’d quit drinking, because you can’t live that way in war and be any good. War turned some people into drunks; it’d done the opposite for Delkoff.
He made the shower run ice cold over his chest and face and stayed under it for several minutes. Then he dressed in his fatigues and army boots, feeling better, his skin tingling from the cold as he walked downstairs, his son’s medal in his shirt pocket again, Pavel’s cross around his neck.
“It’s five till eight,” Little Dmitri said as he sat at the breakfast table.
“What time did we say?”
“First thing. Eight o’clock.” Dmitri wrinkled his nose. Delkoff watched him, trying to figure what else was wrong. The air from the meadow already felt warm through the kitchen windows. Something good was trying to bubble up in Delkoff’s sore head. We can delay this a few minutes, he thought, reaching for the orange juice carton.
He poured a small glass of juice. Dmitri cooked him fried eggs and bacon. “I’ll call him in ten minutes,” he said.
The breakfast brought Delkoff back a little more; he could feel his mental energies recharging. He had always been able to adapt. People didn’t know he could do that. Delkoff understood that he’d made a mistake when he took that first drink on the plane to Paris. But he could put that in a box now and bury it, as he could his earlier mistake. He could only afford to be fighting his enemies today, not himself.
“I’ve heard bad news,” Dmitri told him. “I’m told they went to my sister’s house in Gomel yesterday. We’re going to have to move quickly.”
“Is she all right?”
“They didn’t harm her. But they interrogated her and threatened her. I’m sure they’ll be coming for us soon.”
Delkoff reached for a piece of buttered toast, feeling enormous affection for Dmitri again, for all that his cousin had done for him. Delkoff knew his options: He could hide and work his networks; if he was lucky, he might last another week or two. Or he could deal.
“Before I go,” Delkoff said, “I want to review my accounts with you again, Dmitri. And then I want you to leave here. As soon as I do.”
Delkoff would take what he needed in cash and leave the rest for Dmitri. He’d never been very interested in financial wealth, anyway. Most of his fortune—and that’s what it was now, since signing on to Turov’s project—would help his family and Dmitri’s family.
“Now go ahead,” he said. “Call the American. Deliver the message that I’ll meet him at 10:30. Tell him I have something important to give him.” He looked at his cousin’s disapproving face and dabbed at the crumbs on the plate with his fingertips. “Make it 10:15.”
Dmitri said nothing. Delkoff knew what he was thinking. He watched his little cousin as he began to clean the plates. “The trouble with our president is that he never was a real soldier, isn’t it?” Delkoff said. “His training was to deceive foreigners, and he’s good at it. But now this man controls all of the armed forces, and that is not good.”
“No, it isn’t,” Dmitri said. They had talked of this before. Both were wary of powerful men who had never served as soldiers, particularly men as ambitious and devious as Russia’s president.
“Can you trust them, though?” Dmitri asked, wiping his hands. Meaning the Americans.
“Look who I trusted before. And where it got me.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” Delkoff said. Dmitri was right. “The answer is: yes, I can trust them.” He could trust the Americans because the Americans were not as deceitful as the Russians. The Americans were all the things that Andrei Turov said they were: superficial, arrogant, wasteful, self-absorbed. But Americans were resourceful and they had a strong sense of right and wrong that many Russians didn’t have. And when the Americans made up their minds about something, good luck.
There was something else, too: he kind of liked this Jacob Briggs, what he could remember of him. He was a tough, unrelenting little man, not given to easy loyalties. Built like an American mailbox. A wrestler or boxer, he’d said. A man who looked at you and made you think he wanted to hurt you. But you looked again and saw he didn’t. Delkoff remembered that.
“All right?” he said. “Tell him I want to meet. 10:15. It’ll give me time to finish.”
“Where?”
“You decide.”
Dmitri shrugged. He made a suggestion: there was an old caretaker’s cottage behind an unoccupied residence twelve or thirteen kilometers north, a small inland tract. “Don’t tell him where yet,” he said. “Just have him drive in that direction. We’ll give him directions as he gets closer.”
“The important thing,” Delkoff added, “is you need to get away from here, too, Dmitri. You hear me? You need to go on holiday for a couple of weeks. Because they’ll be coming; within a day or two, they’ll be here. You know that.”
There was emotion in his cousin’s face, too, a faint quivering of his lower lip. The money, Delkoff’s departure. There was a lot of emotion between them that morning, and neither man was comfortable with emotion. The sun was sparkling on the English Channel as they set out twenty minutes later, as though heralding what was ahead. Delkoff carried his country’s history in his shirt pocket now. That was a good feeling; a very good feeling.
The Russian clean-up team arrived in Paris just after 7:35 a.m. There were two men, sent to France by Anton Konkin. Both were former members of Directorate A, the special forces counterterrorism unit of the FSB. The men were now independent contractors, working for Andrei Turov’s security firm.
They first caught sight of the old stone farmhouse at twenty-five past ten, and watched from a distance through binoculars for the next half hour. It appeared vacant then. There were no lights visible, no movement inside. No vehicles outside. But they knew from satellite surveillance that Delkoff was staying there.
The clean-up team pulled their rental car behind the barn adjacent to the house and parked, hidden from view on the only approach road. They broke a back-door window to get inside. The house still smelled of breakfast: eggs, bacon, coffee. There were three sets of clean dishes in the kitchen sink.
The two former FSB men walked through the house carefully, room by room, discovering suitcases in the downstairs bedrooms, clothes folded neatly in drawers and on a bed. Upstairs, they found Delkoff’s duffel bag, a computer, an empty liter bottle of Stolichnaya on its side, an old photograph of a boy who might have been his dead son.
The men who were staying here had probably just gone into the village. They’d be back.
The clean-up team decided to wait. They had nothing else to do. Nowhere to go. They had all the time in the world. They pulled up chairs and watched the road from two upstairs windows, smoking Russian cigarettes. There was just one road in and one road out. They would be right here waiting when Ivan Delkoff returned.
THIRTY-ONE
First thing in the morning. Jake Briggs had already done his workout. A hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups, same as every morning, followed by a dozen wind sprints alongside the wat
er. He had showered and eaten a light breakfast. Now, at eight o’clock, he was waiting by his rental car, bag packed, ready to go.
He’d slept for almost four hours in the rented room. Then he’d laid awake, waiting for sunrise, hearing the Channel through the open window, the seagulls, occasionally a dog barking or a car starting in the village. Thinking about holding Jamie on his knee last Friday, watching the news from Ukraine, the look in his boy’s eyes. “Tear-iss,” he’d called them.
It was Briggs’s second night in France. There wasn’t going to be a third.
Celeste, the woman who ran the boarding house, rose early to walk her dog. She’d brought Briggs criossants and coffee after seeing his door was open and they’d chatted for a few minutes. Celeste was a widow, a smart, attractive woman who ran the apartments with her forty-year-old son. Briggs had walked with her down to the beach and she’d shown him the flobarts, the old flat-bottomed fishing boats still used by the local men. Briggs told her he was on a business trip, driving to Paris after a sightseeing detour. He didn’t give details. She didn’t ask.
Patience, he told himself. Turn anger into patience, weakness into strength. Briggs sometimes wrote sayings like these on scraps of paper, like homemade fortune-cookie messages. Anger was Briggs’s Achilles’ heel. The military had done its best to knock some of that out of him, but they’d never quite gotten the job done. Nor had the process of growing older done it, as it did with most people. He’d felt a raw anger this morning, knowing that Ivan Delkoff was only a few miles away; that he could go after him if he wanted. He knew from satellite photos, and his own surveillance work, where Delkoff was, just down the road from the little restaurant where his cousin went for a drink each night. Briggs had memorized the surrounding roads and the terrain of the adjoining properties.
Delkoff’s security at the house was an unknown, though, and Briggs couldn’t risk failure. He wanted this op to be something that he could tell his son Jamie about one day. He reminded himself of the objective as he waited: get Delkoff in his car and drive him to the Paris airport. Nothing less, nothing more.