The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel by Jason Matthews (16)

The Second Cold War

DIVA’s request that Nash participate in the second meeting with her North Korean nuclear recruitment did not please Benford, who wanted Gable to handle it. But Ricky Walters in Moscow reported that Dominika had insisted Nash specifically be there, which was only going to last a couple of hurried hours, the cottage being so close to IAEA Headquarters and the prying eyes of Noko security gorillas. Benford relented, reasoning they would not have time in two hours to squabble over exfiltration, much less be able to engage, in Gable’s words, in any “gasp-and-grunt.”

Nate flew direct to Copenhagen and took the two-hour flight to Vienna on Austrian Air, then booked a room at the Pension Domizil, half a block down Schulerstrasse from Dominika’s hotel. He left a note with his room number for her, and had breakfast in the curtained dining room. She walked in just as he was finishing. She was elegant in a black skirt, leather tunic with a narrow fur collar, and black-leather ankle boots. It had been three weeks since Greece and, as was usually the case between them, sweet absence dulled the acrimony over her determination to keep spying, despite the mounting dangers. She didn’t want any breakfast and looked at her Line T encrypted ops phone repeatedly for texts from Ioana, who was waiting at the cottage/safe house in case Professor Ri arrived before his scheduled 1200 meeting. They would have two hours with him, the entirety of an extended lunch break, which the five thousand pampered Euro bureaucrats working in the Vienna International Centre in Donaustadt, north of the river, were accustomed to. The complex of glittering Y-shaped buildings was permanent home to an alphabet soup of UN offices, from which phalanxes of international jacks-in-office churned out hectares of documents, all of which were without doubt critical to the continued survival of the planet: IAEA (atomic energy), UNIDO (industrial development), UNODC (drugs and crime), and UNOOSA (outer-space affairs).

Dominika checked her phone again, then leaned over the table, grabbed Nate’s sweater, and pulled him close to kiss him. “Our agent isn’t arriving for two hours, and it takes seven minutes to get there on the Number Eight tram,” she said, sitting back down. “I would therefore like to go upstairs to your room and bump bones.”

Her previous choler from the safe-house spat thankfully eclipsed, Nate relaxed and sat back. “We normally say ‘jump your bones’ to describe what you’re thinking.”

“Why?” said Dominika. “I would think ‘bumping’ describes what I’m thinking more accurately.”

Upstairs, Nate barely had time to hang the BITTE NICHT STöREN sign on the doorknob and close the door. Dominika’s leather-faced tunic squeaked as they made love, fully clothed, in an armchair, mouths plastered together and Dominika’s hair fallen down around her shoulders, tendrils stuck to her sweaty cheeks. A second round consisted of a frantic shedding of clothes, the yanking of the extravagant Austrian eiderdown off the bed, and the reinvention of what historians first called the missionary position, but without any of the original evangelical restraint.

They sat on separate seats across from each other on the tram, with trembling sewing-machine legs and flushed faces, trying not to look at each other. Dominika’s hair had been restored to order, but an errant strand hanging down one side of her face hinted at recent maidenly debauchery. Off the tram, they walked through the garden of the Arcotel, and on the footpath around the reedy Kaiserwasser Lake, and down the last stretch of Laberlweg, a leafy road that ran along a spit of land fronting the upper Danube, a placid branch of the river that rejoined the main river farther downstream. The houses were all cute two-room summer cottages with red or blue ornamental shutters and screened porches. The cottages had grassy front yards that ran down to the shore, each with a pontoon dock for summer canoes and skiffs, now bare and rocking gently in the slow-moving winter water.

It was just 1200 and Professor Ri would appear a few minutes from now. Nate would play a subordinate role during the debriefing, asking CIA intel requirements at appropriate times. Ioana would take a walk during the meeting, standard procedure, but also convenient in that Dominika wouldn’t have to explain who Nate was, at least not right away. Dominika had been toying with the idea of recruiting Ioana for CIA—she would adore Bratok, she knew—and the notion of a subagent, a confederate, helping her in this work was something she wanted to discuss with Benford. She was sure it would work, especially if Ioana graduated from Sparrow status to operations.

When she opened the cottage door she knew the world had caved in. The little living room was a mass of splintered furniture and fallen bookcases, including an overturned, blood-soaked armchair that had been slashed a dozen times, its stuffing scattered over the floor. The galley kitchen was ankle deep in broken plates and glasses. Nate silently motioned to the door, indicating that they should get the hell out, but Dominika shook her head and whispered “Ioana.” Stepping over detritus in the living room, they checked each of the tiny bedrooms. In one, Ioana’s clothes were strewn across the bed and a bedside lamp had been thrown in a corner and smashed. Dominika’s face was white.

They found Professor Ri facedown in the tub in the bathroom, remnants of the five liters of his blood slick along the tub walls, most of it already down the drain and likely feeding the Danube carp. They went back out into the living room, Dominika’s face a grim mask.

“This was Shlykov. He just terminated my North Korean case.”

Nate kept looking around, listening for footsteps. “Shlykov did this?” he said.

“No,” said Dominika. “This is the work of his Spetsnaz bulldog. A man named Blokhin, who killed Repina in New York.”

“Where’s your girl?” said Nate. “Wasn’t she here waiting for your agent?”

“I don’t know,” said Dominika. “I’m worried.” She snapped her fingers. “The recorder.” She went to the sideboard cabinet—it had not been touched—and took out the wire recorder Ioana had installed in anticipation of the debriefing. She plugged it into a wall socket, rewound it, and punched “play.” Nothing but the hiss of dead air. “It’s voice activated,” said Dominika. “She would have put it in standby mode before Ri arrived.” The hissing stopped and Dominika froze, staring at the spools. The two concealed wireless mics had picked up muffled conversation.

Blokhin’s voice suddenly came through clearly, speaking English (so the bastard spoke English all this time, concealing it, thought Dominika). His voice was quiet and silky, then Ioana’s voice, angry and indignant, then Blokhin switched to Russian, harsh and brutal, followed by the cacophony of a struggle. Ioana was strong and lithe and it went on for some time, the sound of her ragged breath first faint, then loud as she moved away from or toward the microphones. There was the constant sound of breaking furniture. Dominika looked imploringly at Nate, then back at the recorder, as Ioana cried an abrupt “nyet!” followed by a groan, then silence, then moaning, and Blokhin’s silky voice again, in English, asking when the Asian gentleman was expected, and would Egorova be coming with him, and Ioana’s voice spitting an obscenity. The sound of a slap, then a heartrending scream, quickly muffled, and Ioana woodenly droning that the meeting was postponed, Egorova wasn’t even in the city, and another scream, What was he doing to her, was she tied in a chair? and then a faint knocking at the front door and Blokhin’s voice moving away, then disappearing altogether until a man’s high-pitched wail was faintly heard while Blokhin did in the bathtub whatever he had decided for the North Korean. While he was out of the room, Ioana, breathing heavily, spoke to the concealed microphone in an urgent trembling whisper. Her voice was tinny and hung in the air.

“He is a Russian, sixty years old, sixty-eight centimeters, ninety kilos, fleshy face with scar tissue across his forehead, thick arms, very strong. I cut his cheek with a glass but it did not cost him a step.” Ioana started crying briefly, then stopped and sniffed. “I think he broke my wrist. He has tied my wrists and ankles and he is using the edge of a broken dish between my legs.” Dominika, eyes streaming, looked at Nate in horror. Ioana knew she was going to die, yet she was leaving a message for Dominika. “He is asking for you, when you will arrive. I have told him you are not coming, but he does not believe me. He intends to kill you too. I’m praying you are not on your way. When it starts again I will scream my head off, maybe you will hear, perhaps he will flee. My broken wrist is bent sideways. Wait. I hear screaming from the bathroom. Your scientist is gone. I’m next, he is coming back. Kill him if you can. Ya tebya lyublyu, I love you, take care scumpo, sweetie.” Dominika put her head in her hands and sobbed.

Blokhin’s voice came back in range of the mike, again cooing to Ioana about when Dominika was expected, perhaps not before Ioana had softened the professor up with this pretty little thing between her legs, and another nightmare scream that subsided into a sob, and Ioana slurring over and over that Egorova was not coming, then she began screaming, bellows from the pit of her stomach, over and over, and her screaming was suddenly cut short, followed by awful gurgling and gasping—Nate recognized the sound of someone drowning in her own blood from a slashed throat—then a grunt from Blokhin as if he had slung her over his shoulder, then the sound of squeaky screen-door hinges. Several minutes of silence then Blokhin was back inside, followed by three solid minutes of the sounds of him smashing everything in the cottage not already broken, then the front door slamming and nothing else but the hiss of the recorder.

Dominika pointed to the overturned armchair, the seat cushion sodden with blood. Ioana had died there. Nate walked to the screen door facing the yard and the river, and pushed it lightly with a finger. It squeaked like on the tape. Blokhin had carried her outside. She was in the river, floating downstream to Budapest, if she hadn’t already fetched up in the crook of a floating log. Nate stopped Dominika, red eyed and teeth bared, from going outside. “Stop,” said Nate. “He could be out there. Let me check.” The yard was empty, but there were drops of blood on the pontoon dock where Blokhin had walked out to reach deeper water and dumped her in. Nate walked to the end of the dock, holding his breath, half expecting to see her staring up at him from the blue-black water under the pontoon floats. Nothing underwater and nothing farther out in the current.

The Alte Donau tributary flowed steadily to join the main branch of the Danube several hundred meters south, and there was more than an even chance her body would be seen bumping through the pilasters of the A22 overpass or another downstream bridge, unless he had wired something heavy around her feet, in which case she would come up in the spring, bleached and swollen, an unidentifiable Jane Doe to confound Austrian authorities until she ended up in the communal section of Zentralfriedhof Cemetery, another Sparrow who finished up away from her home, unclaimed by the country she served, her fate and grave unknown to her family.

Nate heard Dominika coming up behind him; he caught her and steered her off the tipsy dock, and she looked out at the black winter water, screamed and bent over, and vomited on the grass. He led her back inside, splashed her face with water, pocketed the spool of wire from the recorder, rummaged around Ioana’s bedroom and retrieved her Romanian alias passport. They both knew there could be no thought of tipping the police. Professor Ri would be reported missing, but God knows how long it would be before they found him in a rental cottage on the river. Austrian state police forensics were exceedingly thorough. As he closed the front door of the cottage, Nate wiped the doorknob, thinking that between the tub, the furniture, the dishes, and dredging the river bottom under the dock, the owner would have a little spring cleaning to do before the summer rental season began.

They walked back down Laberlweg, the way they had come, Dominika’s cheeks wet with tears. As they walked, Nate half watched for Blokhin to emerge out of the Kaiserwasser in an explosion of foam, like a Nile crocodile ambushing a baby gazelle. But Nate was pretty sure Blokhin would already be halfway to Schwechat and the airport. He had knocked off Dominika’s agent per instructions, had slaughtered the safe-house keeper as a bonus, but had not waited for Egorova, probably because she had been designated a target of opportunity—take her if you can, but don’t loiter on target and don’t get arrested. Ioana’s screams had hurried him on his way. Their late arrival and the North Korean’s early appearance at the cottage probably saved their lives. Nate had no illusions about being able to fend Blokhin off in hand-to-hand combat.

Nate was shocked at the brutality of the Spetsnaz killer. He must be quite the lad. All those guys were hard cases, but this one had a screw loose. It was obvious now that Dominika was a target and in danger. Could her new Kremlin patrons protect her? Inside the palace, sure, but on the street? Opposition party leader Nemtsov had been shot on the busy Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, in the very shadow of the Kremlin’s Vodovzvodnaya Tower. One thing was for sure: Dominika was dead unless CIA could take out this Shlykov asshole and his dancing bear, Blokhin.

Dominika sagged against him, her body trembling and voice shaking. “We were in your room, making love, while she was being tortured, stalling for time, giving herself to save me,” she sobbed. “She had the courage to describe the man who was torturing her, even though she knew she was going to die. Oh, neschastnyy Ioana, poor ill-fated sister. We should have been there.”

“We didn’t know, and if we had been there, we’d be in the river too,” said Nate. “That guy wasn’t going to let anyone walk away.”

“I should have been there,” said Dominika.

Nate stopped in the middle of the pathway and shook her by the shoulders. “Listen to me. Not your fault. A little less guilt and a lot more thinking about surviving. Will this Shlykov take a whack at you in Moscow?”

Dominika shrugged and shook him off. “In the Rodina anything can happen.”

“Then fucking him up in Istanbul is critical. Will you be able to finish him if we can complicate his life?”

“If he fails and embarrasses the president, he is lost. But what will you do?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Nate. As they walked, he outlined the plan to burn Major Shlykov, and her part in the operation. She stopped crying, her eyes blazed, and she thought of Ioana.

In Washington, the ponderous process of selecting a new DCIA heated up and Langley was told to prepare for briefings for the candidates’ use during congressional testimony. Benford contemplated this requirement with unease.

The only policy position of the president that preoccupied Benford was the former’s oft-stated distrust of CIA and the president’s conviction that it was an anachronistic organization, organically prone to misdeeds and illegal acts and, consequently, overdue for demolition and a thorough reorganization. Happily, said the president, a new DCIA would begin critical reforms. To this end, the White House was putting forward three candidates for DCIA, one of whom would be selected by his staff for Senate confirmation. The unsympathetic SSCI approved the plan and ordered CIA to brief the three candidates equally in preparation for confirmation hearings. Briefing sources and methods to candidates before a formal nominee had been selected was heresy, but both the sitting director and the congressional bootlicker Duchin saw to it that division chiefs complied.

Benford sat at the end of the massive oval conference table on the seventh floor of Headquarters, sourly listening to Forsyth finish briefing the three nominees for DCIA on a sensitive EUR Division asset—the representative of the Palestinian Authority to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which case was producing voluminous intelligence on Iranian support to the PLO and Hezbollah. Forsyth’s presentation had been preceded by a briefing from Chief of Latin America Division, the garrulous Johnny Cross—with a pencil mustache and as handsome as a matinee idol—on a case in Caracas, the recruited deputy minister of Petroleum, who had developed into a gold mine of information on the moribund Venezuelan petrochemical industry, including secret payments in the billions from China to keep the spavined government afloat. Next up was Chief of East Asia Division Brenda Neff, blond, busty, and profane, who would tell the nominees about an EA asset, a captain in the Philippine navy who was providing useful assessments and imagery of the fortified atolls in the South China Sea being constructed by Beijing.

Benford wryly noted that his colleagues were briefing on important, but midlevel assets. No division chief was going to totally lift his or her skirt and give up any crown jewels, at least not yet. Duchin knew enough to suspect they were slow rolling, and when the Acting Director heard—as he certainly would from that woodpecker Duchin—the chiefs would be ordered to open the books to the nominees completely. Only a matter of time.

The three nominees sat at the opposite far end of the table, respectively bored, attentive, and mystified. US Senator Celia Feigenbaum was seething: based on her many years on the Senate Appropriations Committee, she was utterly convinced that duplicitous CIA needed to be radically downsized if not abolished, commencing with the ceding of various Directorates to the DOD, the NSA, and the FBI. If confirmed as DCIA, she was determined to clean house, and to Benford, this was a calamitous notion, made trebly astounding by the senator’s expressed view that the abiding clandestine tenets of the Agency—stealing secrets and exploiting vulnerabilities to suborn human targets—were immoral. “It’s not who we are, it’s not what America stands for,” purred the senator frequently and piously to any reporter who thrust a microphone in her face. She was a leading contender, in part because her Pecksniffian views mirrored the president’s.

The senator had arrived with her senior staff director, Robert Farbissen, and she blithely demanded he receive the same briefings as the nominees, to which Congressional Affairs Chief Duchin immediately agreed, seeing as how Rob also had TS clearances. Benford gritted his teeth; it was an outrageous concession. He knew all about Farbissen: he’d been a fixture in Washington for decades, flitting from staff to staff, wreaking havoc with his revanchist fevers and partisan distemper. Short, and squat, with a lopsided mouth and capped teeth beneath a hedge-apple nose, Farbissen triumphantly sat down at the conference table to listen to the cherished secrets from the vaults of the detested CIA. He turned to notice for the first time that Simon Benford was sitting next to him, made a face of great distaste, got up, and moved three seats away, as if Benford were “patient zero” in a plague ward. The measure of the man, thought Benford, is the distance of three seats at the table.

More attentive was US Navy Vice Admiral Audrey Rowland. Trim in her service dress dark-blue uniform, she sat with hands folded on the table, the thick gold sleeve stripes of her three-star rank resplendent against the dark walnut conference table. She had been named Distinguished Student after advanced studies at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at Fort McNair in Washington. During the next twenty years, she’d held increasingly more important positions, most recently as commander of the Office of Naval Research on the shores of the Potomac River in Virginia. At ONR, she energetically supervised nearly three thousand scientists, permanent civilian researchers and contractors, while managing an annual research budget of more than a billion dollars.

Audrey had risen meteorically, passing through flag ranks of rear admiral (bottom half) to rear admiral in two years, and three years later, her third star as vice admiral was awarded. Benford watched her through lowered lashes, noting that she wore more fruit salad on her chest than Bull Halsey, including the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Meritorious Service Medal (three awards), the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (four awards), and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal. None was an award for combat or sea duty.

At forty-nine years old, VADM Aubrey Rowland was the modern empowered woman of the twenty-first-century US Navy: brilliant, an able administrator, and decorous. She had never married—the inevitable gossip occasionally floated around, mainly among envious male peers who were still lowly captains commanding destroyer groups out of Yokosuka—but VADM Rowland otherwise was discreetly considered a benign maiden, totally dedicated to the navy and its mission. When the call went out for prospective nominees for DCIA, Rowland’s name was immediately proposed by the Chief of Naval Operations, the Secretary of the Navy, and seconded by POTUS.

There was precedent: an admiral had helmed CIA in the midseventies; it was too long ago to remember the lasting damage caused by that dour interloper’s so-called Halloween Massacre in 1977 when two hundred operations officers were fired as nonessential, followed by another eight hundred case officers through 1979, uprooting in one stroke an entire generation of experienced street veterans, most with near-native language skills, a priceless commodity. But that was thirty years ago, and today the navy would be tickled to have one of its own again running CIA, none of whose ops officers ever showed much respect to naval intelligence or NCIS, the criminal investigative service. Benford studied the admiral’s long mannish face, jutting chin, and salt-and-pepper hair pulled into a braided bun in back, but with a poufy prairie-wife curl in front that, even to Benford’s blind fashion eye, was bizarre. Rowland noticed Benford looking at her, nodded across the table, and smiled pleasantly, flashing a protruding left incisor. Okay, maybe physicist admirals don’t have to be lovely looking, especially not the brainy ones, he thought. As DCIA, she predictably would focus on the science and technology side of the house, but with luck she’d at least support a clandestine service in dire need of resuscitation.

At the far curve of the table, clearly mystified by at least two-thirds of what had been briefed so far, sat the third nominee for DCIA, Ambassador Thomas “Tommy” Vano, who had starred as a B-film actor in the 1980s (Space Rage, Maniac Brainiac), and was voted sexiest man alive in 1985, but started fading and got out of Hollywood before he permanently crashed and burned. Using modest earnings from the movies, he began buying strip malls in Florida, together with an entrepreneur brother-in-law, at the start of the nineties real-estate boom. More lucky than prescient, Vano made millions, then formed a company, a consortium of investors buying global commodities, including rare and precious metals. Over the next two decades, he followed his partners’ leads and made additional millions, several of which he donated to the right campaign, and in 2008 was named ambassador to Spain. He stayed for four years in a perpetual, if pleasant, state of mild bewilderment, where he first encountered and was transported by the wines of Rioja and caparrones, the earthy Riojan stew of white beans and smoky pimentón pepper.

Inexplicably retained by the State Department after his return from Madrid, he became Ambassador at Large for Intelligence, which meant he had a shabby office in an interior corridor at Main State, with a two-person staff, and attended countless meetings. The position had been unfilled for eighteen months, primarily because no senior State Department diplomat wanted to wet his shoes in the squishy peat bog of the spy world. But Ambassador Vano found liaison meetings with various intelligence agencies around town tolerably interesting, if not particularly demanding and as the State Department rep he was rarely asked to participate (the leper at the square dance, one NSA wit had muttered). He’d had intel briefs as Chief of Mission in Madrid, and found them thrilling, sort of like movie scripts.

However, one day Tommy Vano interrupted a discussion about strategic metals being purchased and hoarded by Moscow and Beijing, and casually mentioned that his consortium was familiar with the global commodities markets, government ministers, commercial buyers, extraction mines, and stockpiles. All of it. From that day, he had a seat at the table and, despite being more affable than discerning, was accepted as a subject-matter expert.

When the call went out for nominees for DCIA, the milk-and-water outgoing secretary of state (who still believed in the code of conduct which held that gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail), proposed the Honorable Thomas Vano for DCIA, citing his business acumen, his foreign experience as a diplomatist, and his attributes as a current Ambassador at Large for Intelligence, with deep ties to, and contacts within, the intelligence community. It was Washington-speak to be sure, and patent nonsense, but Vano made the cut for the final three.

He was tall and bird chested, with a buccaneer’s wavy black hair, limpid pools for eyes, and a Cary Grant cleft on his chin. Benford noted with interest that the sole visible respondent to Vano’s money-Hollywood-sex vibe was EA Division Chief Neff, a known free spirit once referred to by the deputy of the organized crime section in Counternarcotics Division as a habitual receiver of swollen goods. Senator Feigenbaum was too old and mean to care, and Admiral Rowland didn’t move her gold stripes an inch, and seemed oblivious.

God preserve us, thought Benford. A harpy from the Hill intent on destroying the Agency; an awkward physics bluestocking from the navy; and a stuffed-toy millionaire who as ambassador in Madrid thought the Basque terror group’s acronym ETA stood for estimated time of arrival.

Benford had demurred in today’s briefing session, “in the interest of time,” to discuss any Russian cases, and was determined to stall for as long as possible. MAGNIT was still out there, Nash had just reported that the GRU was gunning for DIVA, and all hell was going to pop in Istanbul if they didn’t do something immediately. Istanbul was going to be a disaster.

The WOLVERINEs. In Sevastopol. God help us, I hope they’re as sharp as Forsyth swears they are. The First Cold War ended thirty years ago. We’re fighting the second one now.