by Max Karpov
Harland seemed more interested in his drink again, his hands cradling the glass. But Anna knew she’d reached him. She took back her phone and put it in her purse.
“Okay,” he said at last, looking up as if admitting to a minor error. Then he reached out and put his hand on hers. Anna waited a moment and pulled her hand away. She knew from experience that when Strickland got like this he was liable to do something embarrassing.
Strickland finished his drink. He set a twenty on the table. They both stood.
“Need a ride?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
They walked outdoors and stood on the sidewalk, breathing the warm night air. Anna was going the way he wasn’t. Saying goodbye, he pulled her against him and he kissed her hard on the lips, a misplaced act that felt violent and sad. Anna put a hand on his chest and pushed away.
“Let me see what I can do,” he said, as if nothing strange had just happened.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Hilton Hotel. Washington.
To tell you the truth, I think I’m in trouble,” Sonya Larsen said, absently swirling a glass of merlot in her right hand. “I’m worried about Michael. But I’m more worried about myself. Especially after today, after you called me. I’m afraid someone’s going to be hurt.”
“Michael’s your boss.”
“Yeah.” Her black eyes studied him, roaming his face from his lips to his eyes and back as if he were some species she hadn’t seen before. He wondered how much she really knew about him. They were seated four feet apart on the ninth floor of the Washington Hilton, Sonya on the bed, Jon on the desk chair. She was willing to talk, she said, to tell him “the real story,” but she didn’t want to be quoted. Jon was hoping the ground rules might change slightly after a glass or two of wine.
“Where do you want me to start?” she said.
“How about with Michael. Who is he?”
“I don’t know how much of that I really want to go into—” Her eyes turned to Jon again, roving his features like a slow camera. “I work for Michael. He works for my father, indirectly. But I’m not supposed to know that. Michael represents nonprofits, basically, throughout the country. My father helped me get the job,” she said, speaking with a slight accent—shortening her vowels, a faint v sound at the start of “work.”
“Whose idea was it for you to contact the media, to spread this story?” he said.
“Michael’s. I only did it because I thought the story I told you was true. Both of our countries have conspiracies,” she said. “The difference is, yours become known, ours don’t.” She smiled at that, lamplight glinting on her white teeth as she turned her head. It was a line she’d heard someone else say, Jon could tell.
“So what happened last week? Did you have any idea this was coming?” he said. “I got the sense from your call on Thursday that you did.”
“You mean the plane? No, of course not. I mean, I knew something was coming. I’d heard the government was planning something against Russia. And Putin.”
“That’s why you called me.”
“That’s why I called anyone. Of course.”
“And you knew this how? Because of what Harland Strickland told you?”
“In part.” She glanced out at the city and took another drink of wine. They’d bought a bottle at the bar downstairs and Sonya had just poured her second glass. Jon was still nursing his first. “There were others. But I took pieces of the story from him and put it out there, yeah. It was sort of fun for a while.”
“How did you choose Harland Strickland? Or anyone? Who put you on to these people?”
“Michael did.” She looked at him, her face very young all of a sudden. “They had a list of people, at various levels of government, CIA or Defense or wherever, that they believed could be accessed. That’s part of the business. They compile lists of people and their weaknesses. People who drink too much, or have a gambling problem. Or the honeypot, as they call it. People vulnerable to kompromat. And sometimes I was hired to help exploit that. Get people to talk.”
“Like Strickland.”
“Yeah.” She turned her eyes to him, her lips darkened with wine. “His weakness is that he likes to feel important. He likes people to talk to him like he’s important. And he also likes young girls.” She looked down and smiled quickly.
“And what did Strickland tell you, exactly?”
“Not much. No more than a few sentences that were worth anything.”
“Tell me.”
She shrugged. “Just—we’d be talking about Russia, or Putin, and he would say something like, ‘And what if it was possible for us to eliminate that problem?’ And I’d make a stupid face and ask a couple of questions and store it all away. I think I may’ve eventually freaked him out a little with my questions. In the end, he cut me off cold turkey.”
“When was this?”
“A week ago? Ten days.”
“And then the plane happened,” Jon said. “You say you had no idea ahead of time?”
“Of course not.” He noticed the shadow of hair across her upper lip as she turned her head. “But then when I saw what happened, and I saw your country was being blamed, my first thought was, ‘So, they were right. The US really did this.’ And at the same time, I felt guilty.”
“Why guilty?” Jon said.
“Because. I knew something was coming and I hadn’t been able to stop it. Of course, it took another few hours before I found out the truth. And then I realized I’d been duped.”
“How?”
She looked at her wine, formulating a reply. “Until then I believed that the United States, or some group in the government, or the military, really was planning to eliminate Putin. Michael was egging me on a little with that, making me believe it. So when I found out he was alive, I freaked out. Because there were a couple of remarks Michael made that were very suspicious in hindsight. And then eventually it all came together. And I thought: of course they knew about it. They knew about it because they had planned it.”
“‘They’ being your father? And Michael?”
She nodded, keeping her eyes down.
“You need to talk to someone,” Jon said, feeling responsible for her all of a sudden. “You need to make a request for immunity.”
“I know I do.” She held her wine glass in both hands. “Why do you think I’m talking with you? Are you going to help me?”
“I will, yes.”
Jon tried to remember Roger Yorke’s phone number. But he wanted to hear the rest of her story first.
“So you believe now that your father was involved? That he may’ve planned the attack, as these reports are saying—”
“Helped plan it. Yeah, I do.”
“And you believe the Russian president was also involved?”
She made a face. “If not, there’s no reason my father would’ve done it,” she said, a catch in her voice. “But I’ll tell you the thing I’m afraid of. It’s that my father gets blamed for all this and the little monster gets away again. My father, he used to say, ‘little thieves are hanged, the great ones escape.’ I used to think that maybe he was a great one. He acted like it. But he wasn’t; he just worked for one.” She took a long drink. The glass made a louder-than-expected thunk on the wooden table. “You know, my mother used to say, ‘Why does your father make things so difficult for himself?’ We never knew. I think it goes back to his own family. His father left when he was three or four years old and he was always looking for authority figures. And Putin became kind of a father figure to him. The biggest authority figure in the world, right?”
“So tell me the real story,” Jon said, pivoting to what she’d told him on the drive downtown. “You said there was a ‘real’ story you could share.”
“Yeah. There is.” She gave him a lingering look. “There was this thing my father used to say, going back, about the ‘catalyst.’ That’s what he called it. ‘All it takes is a catalyst.’ A match to light a fuse and the United States will go up
in flames, same as the Soviet Union did in 1991. The US is just as vulnerable, even if they don’t know it yet. They talk about that a lot in Russia now, you know, the so-called political theorists. They talk about the breakup of the United States and the resurgence of Russia as if they’re the same thing.”
“Strategic relativism,” Jon said.
“Yeah, right.” A flicker of recognition crossed her face. “Anyway, the catalyst sets off a chain reaction. But first you have to create a pathway. That’s Michael’s business, basically. That’s what his mission is here: creating the pathway. I’m not supposed to know that, of course,” she said. “But you spend enough time around someone, you figure things out.”
“Michael works with nonprofits, you said.”
“He helps coordinate a whole network, yeah, that’s what he came here for. Nonprofits, think tanks, media companies, charities, political action groups. Influence operations, basically. My father used to say, ‘America is sleeping. Anyone can walk in the house now and take whatever they want. Even the ownership deed.’ It’s the weakness of an open society.”
“The ultimate purpose of this infiltration being what, then?” Jon said. “To break the country apart?”
“I guess. I don’t really know the ultimate purpose.” She lifted her glass and pointed it at the blank television screen; the color of her fingernails was slightly darker than the wine. “Secession is in the news now in Texas, right? But it’s set up to go in other states, too. If you want to break up the United States, do it from within. Disrupt their culture; create racial, social, and political unrest. But let their own people do it. Make them think things are bad and soon they will be. That was one of my father’s big ideas.
“And in some cases, of course, there are organizations already doing it,” she went on. “Ready-made fringe groups, Michael calls them. Like some of these so-called patriot groups that want to destabilize the government. They’ve done the same thing in Europe.”
“So August 13 was a catalyst for that. That’s what you’re saying?”
“I think so.” She took a sip of wine and set her glass down. “You know, when I was little, my father taught me a certain kind of chess that you could win in four moves. But he warned me: it only works with players who don’t know the game.”
“And the United States doesn’t know this game. Is that what you’re saying?”
Sonya shrug-nodded.
“How much of this can I write?” he said.
“It doesn’t really matter. I don’t care that much about your story, to be honest. I care about what’s going to happen to me.”
“All right. Let’s make the call.”
Jon had left his cell phone in his car, he remembered. So he used the room phone instead, as Sonya stood and walked to the window, taking in the view of the city. He reached Roger Yorke at his home, hoping no one was listening in on them. “Stay with Sonya,” Roger instructed him, and he would contact the federal marshals program. Ten minutes later he called back to say that a federal agent was on his way to the Hilton. Roger, too, would be down, to give Jon a ride home.
He wondered for a while if Sonya might change her mind in the interim. If she’d be tempted to return to the familiarity of her life in Washington with Michael Ketchler. But he could see she was already past that. Whatever secrets and self-consciousness she had carried into this hotel room fell away and she talked with an expanding energy and confidence, telling Jon about her upbringing, her parents, her younger sister Svetlana, her mother’s death in England, her brief, troubled marriage to Edward Larsen, and the odyssey that had brought her to Washington. Her resolve only seemed to harden as they talked, and he understood why she had brought him here: this room was her escape hatch to a new life. Jon listened, prodding her slightly with questions while becoming lost several times in the dark intensity of her eyes—imagining the places they’d been, the people they’d seen.
When the conversation ended with a knock on the door, it felt to Jon like coming awake from an interesting dream and knowing he could never enter it again. Talking with Roger in the elevator, he was already struggling to remember some of what Sonya had said. But he walked out of the hotel that night with something he didn’t have going in.
FIFTY-NINE
Thursday, August 19. Bethesda, Maryland.
The call from the president woke Anna Carpenter just after sunrise. It was the first time he had ever called her. The president’s chief of staff actually placed the call, but in two minutes Anna was on with the president.
“I just met with Harland,” he told her. “I wanted to tell you, we’re getting behind this Turov story. I wish you’d mentioned it to me on Tuesday.”
“I guess I should have.” Anna stood in the living room in pajamas and a kimono robe, looking at the backyard, as her dachshunds nudged competitively against her ankles.
“No. You shouldn’t.” He chuckled. “I wouldn’t have listened to you if you had. As we both know.” Anna slid open the glass doors. She breathed the damp air, blinking at sunrise gleaming on the porch wood. “I’m going on television at 10:00 to talk about this Delkoff document,” the president said. “I’d appreciate it if you could carry the torch for us this afternoon.”
“Sure. I’d be honored to.” Although I’m supposed to pick up Christopher first, in Virginia, she thought. “How’s Harland?”
“He told me about your conversation last night,” the president said. “I don’t know how you persuaded him. But obviously, you did.”
“I’m a politician,” she said. “It’s what I do.”
“Yes, you are. Frankly, I’m disappointed in Harland. He’s been blocking us on this for several days. Even if he meant well.”
Anna was silent, imagining what Strickland had told POTUS. Pleased that the “spy in the house” wasn’t the president himself.
“He offered his resignation,” the president continued.
“You didn’t accept.”
“No, of course I didn’t. We don’t need any more distractions at the moment. But also, I can use his help. He’s assured me he’ll be on the phone all day working this story for us. And he might help us on Turov going forward. I mean, what’s his resignation going to accomplish?”
“Not a lot.”
“I like what I’m hearing from Russia, by the way, that the opposition groups may be getting behind this,” he said. “We’re going to win, Anna. In a big way. But the next two days are critical. I’m having a copy of my talk sent to you. I’d like you to follow up on the afternoon shows. And do some interviews with the print media if you could.”
“All right.” Anna stood barefoot on the edge of the wooden porch. So Harland Strickland had done the right thing. It was sort of hard to believe. But at the same time, Anna had a funny feeling about him again. Wondering if they’d given Harland a pass in some way.
Just before hanging up with the president she looked at the mantel clock and realized that Christopher had already landed back on American soil.
It was still dark as the Gulfstream V commuter plane began its descent to the small airport north of Williamsburg, Virginia. Christopher gazed down at the scattered clusters of lights and felt far from the human folly of Washington, much as astronauts viewed mankind’s problems as inconsequential from the vantage point of space.
But as the rural highways and the patches of scrub pines and soybean fields began to regain their authority, he thought about Anna, knowing that she was down there, waiting for him, and Washington became increasingly appealing again, follies and all.
The Delkoff document had been online now for several hours, but it wasn’t gaining the traction Christopher had expected. The prevailing opinion still seemed to be that the United States was complicit in the assassination attempt on Russia’s president, that the CIA had worked a deal with a Ukrainian arms trader and Ukrainian intelligence officers to bring down the plane.
There were several stories online about Turov’s death, some calling him “a prominent Russian
businessman with ties to the Kremlin.” One Russian news site reported that he’d been killed at a home in the Moscow suburbs, the victim of a “burglary gone bad.” But many opposition blogs and tweets were spreading the story that it was the FSB who had assassinated Turov, possibly as payback for leaking details about the Delkoff op. Amira had come through.
Chris Niles and Jake Briggs were shuttled from the airport to a mirror-sided government building eighty minutes to the north. A debriefer from AS Division got them first, separately, although the stories they told about Moscow were nearly identical, accurate if incomplete. Chris said nothing about the deal that he had almost struck with Andrei Turov. He described Turov’s killing as self-defense. The official accounts of their mission would be filed away in the guts of the CIA, he knew, with thousands of other “black” operations carried out over the past sixty years. It was unlikely anyone would ever read them.
He met Martin Lindgren in a little conference room down the hall. Even here, Martin had an English tea set, like a man transported from an earlier time. They shared a heartfelt handshake. “Welcome home,” Martin said. “You know, I’m not sure I ever apologized for spoiling your vacation in Greece.”
“Next time we’re not leaving a forwarding address.”
Martin showed his uneven smile as they sat. The sun was up, shining through the trees. On the table was a single file folder and a stack of paper that resembled a book manuscript.
“Coffee?”
“I’m fine.”
Chris waited. “I spoke with the president,” Martin said. “The administration’s getting behind Delkoff’s account. The opposition in Russia is on board, too. I suppose you had something to do with that?” Chris didn’t respond. “It’s beginning to cause a slightly awkward situation for the Kremlin, as you can imagine. More than they’d care to let on.”