21

Elena knew that the West viewed the president of the Russian Federation as a Bond villain. The guy took out his political enemies with radioactive tea, for God’s sake. He had his intelligence agencies hack and release the e-mail of U.S. political parties to influence presidential elections. He was perceived at once as scary and comic. You took him seriously—very seriously—but you scoffed behind his back.

And she knew that while Canadian citizens had been welcoming Muslim immigrants in the worst of the refugee crisis a couple of years ago, an awful lot of everyday Americans had presumed that Islam was a synonym for ISIS. They were convinced that all mosques, whether they were in Fallujah or Florida, were breeding grounds for suicide bombers, and they armed themselves with semiautomatic weapons. They convinced themselves they were safe if they had guns and walls.

She wished the world were that simple. She thought of something one of her father’s FSB friends had said to her back in Sochi, when he was testing the waters with her—seeing if he might be able to recruit her. “It’s a terrible era when idiots are allowed to govern the blind,” he had said. “I’m paraphrasing Shakespeare—perhaps rather badly—but I’m sure you get my drift. The world is a madhouse, Elena. Always has been, always will be. And it’s a complicated madhouse. Now, our country has the potential to be the best, I feel. You know, after all we’ve been through. All that our people have endured. But it’s a very low bar.”

And yet there wasn’t a Cold War anymore. At least not the way that her father and her grandparents would have understood the term. There certainly wasn’t a World War. At least not yet. The United States and Russia had grown as nationalist as ever and, thus, rather testy with one another. At first that hadn’t been the case. For a time, the United States had shed great crocodile tears for the people of Aleppo, but they understood that Syria—and obviously Ukraine and Crimea—weren’t in their backyard. They were in Russia’s. And so other than the op-ed writers, for a long while no one in North America really cared all that much even when the Russian Federation deployed nuclear Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, or what had been Königsberg forever.

Good Lord, half of America was pretty sure their own president was a Russian puppet.

The truth was, very few men or women on the streets of Indianapolis or Kansas City fretted all that much when the Russians penetrated the country’s NSA computer system. No one lost sleep when they turned—converted—another contractor who hoarded boxes of files in his utility shed the way some people held on to old issues of Life magazine or plastic Star Wars action models or porcelain figurines of Siamese cats.

No more.

If any patch of sand in the world was capable of creating another world war, she believed, it was Syria. Oh, North Korea had the ICBMs and the nukes while the Syrian army was often—very often—reduced to pushing primitive barrel bombs from helicopters. But the Syrian skies were crowded, and the refugee crisis had the West on the edge. Nations great and small were terrified of the suicidal psychotics, sometimes homegrown and sometimes imports, with bombs strapped to their chests or automatic weapons in their arms or simply a very big truck they would use to plow through a crowd as if the pedestrians were merely raccoons crossing a country road in the still of night. They would appear from nowhere, human land mines, and butcher the unlucky women and men around them in the nightclubs and airports and movie theaters. They killed people by the dozens or by the hundreds. It was random. And then they killed themselves.

Were those crazies any worse than the Syrian soldiers who shoved the barrel bombs out the chopper doors? Perhaps, but only because they were suicidal. The Syrian army would drop a bomb on (for instance) a rebel-held neighborhood, wait twenty minutes for the rescuers to start pulling their neighbors from the rubble, and then drop a second one. The barrel bombs killed tens of thousands more civilians than the chemical weapons.

But it was the chemical weapons that caused voters in places like Munich and Manchester and Minneapolis to pay attention. It was the videos of the children choking to death and the adults vomiting and frothing at the mouth. If you want to get the attention of the White House, kill children with sarin. Send it via a surface-to-surface missile or drop it from a MiG.

The Russian drones moved slowly across the same skies as the Americans’. Distant pilots on the ground would guide them over their targets, and the unmanned machines would send back the video images and coordinates. This was how it worked in Ukraine, and this was how it worked in Syria. The Russian drones certainly weren’t low tech, but unlike the American and Chinese models, they were still capable only of surveillance.

Imagine: all that money to protect one pilot from having to fly a plane inside its cockpit. Meanwhile, you’re still savaging the civilians with tools as barbaric as barrel bombs and as brutal as sarin.

Sometimes she looked at Viktor or she looked at photos of the presidents in Washington and Moscow and Damascus and thought darkly to herself, this is where it all ends. Here.

But there was, alas, just no turning back.

And so she did what she could, which really wasn’t much and probably wasn’t worth the toll it exacted upon her mental health.

But unlike the terrorists and anarchists and jihadists, she could still count on one hand the number of people she had executed (though she did need her thumb). Most of what she did—and what she had been hoping to do in Dubai once Sokolov was dead—was rather bureaucratic. She could never tell Viktor or anyone else, but she lived with a certain amount of self-hatred, even if (so far) the dead on her conscience all needed to die. Even, just maybe, Sokolov. Both sides would have agreed.

But he was the least definite. Speaking objectively, he wasn’t evil. But he also couldn’t be trusted. You didn’t steal from Viktor. Still, he wasn’t like the slime she had executed in Latakia or the cretin she had executed in Donetsk: he’d simply paddled into white water he thought he could navigate. He was rather like her: a pawn. Square D2 or E2 on the chessboard. The pawn moved out to open clean attack lines for the bishop. Against most players, a pawn didn’t last long. He’d done his job and delivered the goods. She had to kill him for one reason and one reason only: because Viktor had asked.

She listened to the soothing hum of the engines in the dark and closed her eyes. She wished she could go back in time. She wished she could go back to the Royal Phoenician that night.

No, she wished she could go back to the moment before she had gone to the hotel. When she had called him.

Alex, hello! Lovely to know we’re going to meet tomorrow. Are you alone?

That last question? It hadn’t crossed her mind to ask it. She should have. Because then he would have answered, Actually, I’m not. I have a new friend with me. But, please, come over anyway.

But this time she wouldn’t have come over. She would have waited. Maybe she would have gone to the Royal Phoenician much later that night instead. Maybe not. Maybe she would have taken care of Sokolov the next day. Or the next night.

Alas, she couldn’t go back in time. She could only go forward. Do her job. Fix the mess she had made and then survey her options.