The Children's Game
Page 29
He briefly showed Jon a gracious face, part of Martin’s charm. “All right. Please.”
“Jon has learned something about Andrei Turov’s daughter,” Anna said, “and I’m curious how much of it you know.”
“His daughter?”
“Yes. Christopher mentioned something the other day about a Russian asset. I know you can’t discuss that, but I just want to make sure we’re not talking about the same person.”
“I don’t follow,” Martin said. Comfortable talking with her, not him.
“Jon thinks Andrei Turov’s daughter is the person who leaked this story about the so-called assassination committee to the media. Maybe working for the Russian government.”
Martin frowned. “And how would that be?”
“We think she’s living here in D.C.” Anna said. “And that, for whatever reason, she may have become friendly with someone in the intel community. Who inadvertently gave her some classified information. As pillow talk.”
Martin’s smile was careful. “I don’t think Svetlana Turov’s ever even been to the States, actually,” he said. “She’s been living with her father in the country outside of Moscow. Or staying at their vacation home in Switzerland.”
“Not Svetlana,” she said, glancing at Jon. “Sonya. The older daughter.”
“Sonya.” The vertical lines deepened between his brows. Sonya’s not his asset, Anna could see. “Sonya Turov’s been estranged from her father for years,” he said. “Living in London under a different name.”
“We don’t think she’s in London anymore,” Anna said. She realized that he hadn’t denied that Svetlana was his asset. “We think she’s in D.C.”
Jon summarized for Martin what he and David had discovered, as they’d discussed on the drive over. “I wanted to make sure she wasn’t your source first,” she said once he finished. “I didn’t want to—” Anna stopped, so as not to say the rest out loud.
“No,” Martin said, picking up on it. “Have you made any contact with Sonya Turov?” he asked Jon, taking on his more formal tone again.
“Not directly, no. But I plan to.”
Martin looked at Anna. “So even if this is true, we have to be prudent. We can’t do anything, of course, until we hear back,” he said.
“I agree.” They couldn’t risk this story going out while Christopher was still in Moscow pursuing Turov.
Jon lowered his eyes. He seemed to be tuning them out as they spoke in coded language about Christopher and his mission in Russia, without using names. But Anna had a sense that in his faraway silence, in his look of detached disinterest, Jon was absorbing every bit of it, every word and nuance. It was funny, catching a glimpse of Christopher’s personality in someone else’s face. It was the first time she really saw them as brothers.
FORTY-NINE
Moscow.
Christopher Niles walked through the rain alongside the river after meeting Briggs, enjoying how the sky had turned dark like evening, headlights skimming off the wet asphalt and apartment facades.
At the hotel, he changed into a dry shirt and pants and lay on the bed, focusing, the way he used to focus before Friday night football games. Thinking about the trajectory of events that had brought him here—not Turov’s four-move chess game, but the game Turov was playing with him. And returning to the same question: How much of this had been a setup? The urgent summons to London for the meeting with Petrenko. The revelation of “the children’s game.” The toss-away detail that maybe the first move had already been played. And now this meeting. Could all of that have been Turov, tugging on the same string?
Before going out again, Chris said a prayer, because he had promised Anna he would do so each day, and it felt like a way of connecting with her. Having given his travel bag to Briggs, he walked into the rain carrying only an umbrella and a binder with Delkoff’s “Declaration,” which he’d printed out in the business center at the hotel.
He walked to the Metro stop and caught a train to the Park Kultury station at Gorky Park. There he waited for several minutes out of the rain, watching traffic, stepping to the curb just before 2:30 p.m. as a white cargo van stopped, its emergency lights flashing. The van’s rear doors opened and a thuggish-looking man in jeans and a leather jacket waved him in. The man frisked him for a weapon and asked to see his passport. Then he stepped out and closed the doors, leaving Christopher inside, seated in an old armchair.
He heard the front passenger door open and close. Then the van lurched from the curb, speeding into the thundering rain. Music played through a single speaker, a Russian symphony he half-recognized: Tchaikovsky, maybe. He tried to picture their route for a while, recognizing when they came to the MKAD, Moscow’s ten-lane beltway that circled the city. Wondering if Briggs was with them, although he wasn’t especially worried about that. Jake Briggs was good, relentless, and a little crazy. He’d find them.
Chris eventually closed his eyes and tried to rest his thoughts in preparation for what was coming. There was a story he’d heard once about meeting Andrei Turov: when he summoned you to his home—which wasn’t really his home, but a residential front in one of Moscow’s new gated “villages”—Turov sometimes gave his guest what was known as the Turov Option. Visitors had the choice of accepting or declining. If you accepted, your life entered a new, more prosperous phase; if you declined, you didn’t leave the house alive. It wasn’t much of an option.
The drive went on for nearly an hour, although Chris suspected from the turns and reversals that they hadn’t gone far, entering and exiting the MKAD several times. Finally, the van slowed to a stop and he heard the faint whirr of a gate through the rain and over the Russian music. Minutes later, they stopped again for another gate; he felt them turning around and backing into a garage. Then suddenly the rain was muted.
The man who greeted him when the doors sprang open was Anton Konkin, Turov’s lieutenant and chief of security. Chris recognized him right away, although they had never met. Konkin had been Turov’s liaison to the main office of Turov Security for eight or nine years. It was Konkin who oversaw the large “hackers-for-hire” operation that Turov ran out of Moscow. Supposedly he had earned his stripes carrying out several high-profile political killings during the late 1990s. A small, heavily muscled man with a shaved head, he led Christopher down a polished wooden hallway in what seemed a brand-new two-story house, with lots of modern touches, to a corner office. Konkin stood outside and motioned Chris in, closing the door behind him.
Briggs watched the van’s turn signal begin to flash and he immediately pulled to the side of the road. He had followed the van for nearly an hour, never losing sight of it for more than a few minutes as Turov’s driver doubled back on the MKAD and finally took a highway northwest of Moscow to this two-lane country road. Now he’d have to go the rest of the way on foot.
He parked the Lada in a gully off the shoulder, stuffed his 9mm Glock inside the waist of his pants, and jumped out. He began to run toward the fenced development, where the van was now queued up to enter. On the other side was a mishmash of nouveau mansions: English country estates, Italian villas, neo-modern monstrosities. Most of them, Briggs suspected, were owned by Moscow’s young capitalists and robber barons. Some were still under construction. The gated community was set off from the road by a wrought-iron fence, which Briggs was able to climb easily.
Once inside, it took him a few moments to spot the van, which was now moving down the main road of the development through the rain. Briggs ran full tilt across an empty lot. He stopped on the road to catch his breath and to get his bearings, having lost sight of the van again among the houses. But then he found it: the familiar pattern of the taillights braking in the distance, seeming to blur and disappear and then reappear in the open spaces.
Briggs began to run again, cutting through another empty lot. Seeing the lights brighten and blur and then disappear behind a brick wall.
Briggs stopped, figuring his options. He was maybe a third of a mile away n
ow. He saw the house lights go on. Christopher had asked him to provide cover, to be a “witness.” To do that, Briggs needed to stay close. Ready if Chris gave a signal, and even if he didn’t. Christopher’s words played like dark music in his head as he walked across the field in the rain: However this turns out, it’s just us. No one’s coming in to rescue us. It’s a two-man op. But that’s a good thing.
Briggs didn’t know how the op was going to end, but he knew this: it wasn’t going to end the way France had ended.
FIFTY
The office was furnished with expensive leather and brass, dark cabinets and shelves, a plank floor with oval throw rugs. It took Christopher a few seconds to find Turov, seated at a desk in the far corner, his face in shadows behind a desk lamp. “Welcome,” he said, rising to extend his hand as if they were old acquaintances. “It’s been a few years.”
Chris recognized Turov’s understated confidence immediately, as he did the reasonable set of his mouth and the strange, pale blue eyes. The great Turov. There was the reputation—which even Chris had allowed to become inflated in his mind—and there was the man, who always struck people as smaller and more ordinary than they expected.
“You’re a teacher now,” Andrei Turov said, speaking Russian in a soft, pleasing voice. “You’re in Moscow researching the Orthodox Church.”
“Yes.”
“A worthy subject. The church has become an integral part of Russia’s vision for the future. As you know.”
“I see that,” Christopher said.
Turov motioned for him to sit in the leather chair in front of the desk.
“Shall we talk in English?” Turov said.
“Please.”
Turov nodded to the laptop screen on his desk: a Russian television newscast. “It’s not going so well for your country. I’m sorry to see that,” he said, grimacing as if the news troubled him personally. As with many people who were despicable from a distance, it was surprising again to find Turov so likeable up close. But then, Turov was in the illusion business, Chris reminded himself. “The world’s opinion has turned,” he said. “They don’t believe you anymore. They’ve found the ‘smoking gun’ now, they’re saying.”
“That’s the story, anyway,” Chris said.
Turov moved a folder to the center of his desk. Christopher noticed the dirt crescents under two of Turov’s fingernails as he opened it. “I have a copy here of the report you wrote about me, several years ago.” This surprised him, that Turov had this, and he wondered for a moment if Briggs had been right, if this meeting might be a trap. “We’ve met only once. But you write here as if you know me. You did a very thorough job. I was impressed,” Turov said, speaking English with just a trace of accent, his “r”s rolling slightly. “But your conclusions made me seem like a very bad man.” He flipped several pages, past sections highlighted in yellow. “For instance, you claim here, on Page 8, that I was quote ‘potentially the most dangerous man in Russia.’” He looked up. “I guess I should be flattered.”
Christopher shook his head. “I didn’t say that. I quoted someone who did. Is that why you contacted me? To discuss my report?”
“No.” Turov closed the file, serious again. “Actually, you contacted me first, I believe.” His eyes turned to Chris’s binder. “You’ve brought some business with you?”
“Yes. I thought you’d like to see what Ivan Delkoff left behind for the world to read. If you haven’t seen it already.” He handed Turov a copy of Delkoff’s “Declaration.” “They have copies of this in Washington,” he said. “The media will have it, too. It’s his account of August 13. Not what we’ve been hearing so far on television.”
Turov’s face retained a mask-like expression as he skimmed the document. By the time he set it down, and smiled, Christopher knew that he’d already seen it. “No one’s going to believe this, of course,” Turov said. “We both know that. There’s too much evidence now against your country. And there’s more coming, I hear. Much worse.”
“Maybe true,” Chris said. “And from what I’m reading, it may only be two or three days before Russia takes retaliatory action in Ukraine or Estonia.”
“Yes.” For a surprising moment, the bulb of Turov’s confidence seemed to dim. “Obviously, we’d all like to avoid that. Publicly, of course, your country has been locked out of a serious negotiating role, for obvious reasons.” Christopher said nothing. “But privately, it’s a different business, isn’t it? Privately, there’s no reason we couldn’t try to work something out on behalf of our countries. As two outside agents.”
“Sort of like a Track II negotiation, you’re saying,” he said.
“Something like that, yes.”
“Which you could sell to the Kremlin. And I could sell to Washington?” As you sold them the attack of August 13, he wanted to add. He watched the steadiness of Turov’s expression. Only his eyes did not seem ordinary; his blue eyes were so unusual that looking at them for long felt almost voyeuristic.
“Yes, why not?” Turov said. “So much is done now by third parties, anyway, isn’t it?”
“Forgetting for a moment the twenty-six people who died in that attack,” Chris said, in a tone that he expected would prod Turov.
But Turov just smiled. “What happened on August 13 was a terror attack,” he said. “Right now, your country has its own theories about who was behind it, we have ours. There is some common ground in those ideas, and maybe that’s where we could start to work together. We could agree, for instance, that the attack was carried out by a rogue GRU colonel named Ivan Delkoff. And that a Ukrainian financier named Dmitro Hordiyenko—who operates a private militia and has funded campaigns against President Putin—procured the equipment.
“We could also agree on who carried out the mission: Zelenko, Pletner, Kolchak.”
“I won’t argue with any of that,” Chris said.
“And so, the real question becomes: What could be accomplished if we were to align our narratives? If you were able to put aside your prejudices and conspiracy theories about Russia, to step back from your notions of American exceptionalism—or triumphalism, as we call it—so we could tell a story that benefited both of us.”
“Is that what you’re proposing?”
“It was, yes.” Turov smiled privately. “I have two proposals, actually. But we could begin with that: What if our countries were to agree—after a proper investigation, of course—on a public accounting of what happened on August 13? To say, for example, that the attack was planned not by the Kremlin, and not in Washington. Sparing our governments that humiliation.”
Chris was silent. A sustained rumble of low thunder shook the house. Humiliation, he knew, was a sensitive subject in Russia; 1991 and the lost Soviet empire still sat uneasily in the psyches of many Russians.
“Instead, we present evidence, at the conclusion of an international inquiry—and after negotiating certain concessions—showing that the operation was planned and carried out by Delkoff, working with extremist, right-wing forces in Ukraine.”
“So that both the United States and Russia come out as winners, you’re saying.”
A tiny smile tugged the corners of Turov’s mouth.
“Your proposal would benefit Russia far more than us, though, wouldn’t it?” Chris said.
Turov frowned, as if not comprehending. “Really? Most of the world now thinks that August 13 was planned and funded by your CIA. What I’m saying is, imagine what we could do if we were able to move past that story. And work together, on matters of substance: terrorism. ISIS. North Korea. Israel-Palestine. We could do some remarkable things together. We might even give the world a better example. One that would make war less likely in the future. Sometimes,” he added, “it’s up to people like us to make the moves that our governments aren’t able to make. I think you probably feel the same.”
“Probably,” Chris said, knowing now what Turov was doing. “Although that sounds more like an American sentiment than a Russian one.”
“You mentioned concessions. What would they be?”
“Both countries would remove sanctions,” Turov said. “You would consider repealing your so-called Magnitsky legislation. NATO would back away from our borders. And back away from this European Reassurance Initiative. Which gives you the right to put troops on our borders in violation of past agreements. It would be like us putting our troops along the borders of Mexico and Canada.” Chris smiled. “Instead, we’d resolve to work together. You’d come to respect Russia’s history and traditions, our role in the Middle East, our partnerships in Asia, and we’d respect America’s interests. Within reason.”
A sudden burst of thunder shook the house, rattling the windows. Christopher felt Turov’s blue eyes watching him. “It’s a nice idea, anyway,” he said. “But none of that’s going to happen, is it? That isn’t why you called me here.”
“It was.” Turov’s smile was like a twitch this time. “I wanted to give you the optimistic, more American version first, as you say. An idea we might come back to.”
“All right.”
Turov looked away, as though hearing something unsettling outside in the pounding rain, and Christopher caught a glimpse of his darker calculations. And understood: there was one more Turov illusion coming.
“So tell me about the second proposal,” Chris said. “Tell me the reason I’m here.”
FIFTY-ONE
Jake Briggs stood behind the wall, staring up at the bricks and mortar as rain fell in hard slants though the trees. He’d scaled walls like this hundreds of times in training. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was whether he should. Christopher had said nothing about following him onto the property. Only that he wanted him to know where he was, to “be a witness.” Briggs knew that he might jeopardize the mission now if he made a wrong move. He reminded himself that this was Chris’s operation, not his. He was here as backup.