The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel by Jason Matthews (19)

Phase Two

Nate’s primary liaison contact in the TNP was a thirty-year-old captain named Hanefi. He was short and dark, with a single caterpillar eyebrow and a thick black mustache, which would twitch sideways whenever he was agitated. He was learning English and tried to use it at every opportunity. The backs of Hanefi’s hands were something out of Phantom of the Opera—burned during an explosion—and he self-consciously hid the shiny disfigurement by keeping them in his pockets. Nate and Hanefi worked well together, but not before the intense police officer began trusting Nate. Gable had warned him about working with Turks: “No recruitment attempts, no case-officer moves, not even if one of them volunteers. They take their time warming up, but once they’re satisfied you’re not working them, they’re your friends for life. But if they later catch you trying to pick their pockets, they’ll never forgive or forget.”

Nate spent hours with Hanefi, listening to teltaps of Shlykov on the phone with Moscow and various PKK cell leaders—Russian and fractured English were used—discussing the upcoming weapons delivery. For an officer of his rank, Shlykov’s comsec (sense of communications security over the phone) was nonexistent. Each careless call to a separatist would identify five more members, those five, ten more. Each identified location led to the next two, then the next three, all of them in Istanbul’s sooty suburbs: Cebeci, Alibeyköy, Güzeltepe; an apartment in a rust-stained high-rise; a daub-and-wattle shed on a muddy lane; or a sagging farmhouse in a garbage-choked gully. There were so many sites that additional police units were brought in from Ankara to assist in surveilling all the locations.

Then the munitions arrived and a TNP helicopter with a HYENA receiver vectored TNP surveillance teams—they were as good as Nate had ever seen anywhere—to warehouses where the explosives would be stored before dispersal. The patient Turks set up on each location, watching, marking suspects. A coordinated assault plan was finalized. The Turks were impressed with Nate’s beacons; they were a marvel, said Hanefi.

“How did you do it, Nate Bey?” asked Hanefi late one night in a smoke-choked listening post, referring to the crates. Nate smiled.

“If you asked me whether we did it in Russia, I couldn’t tell you,” said Nate. Hanefi put back his head and laughed.

“Aferin, sen Osmanli,” said Hanefi. He meant, Bravo, you’re an Ottoman, a righteous stud.

The night of the multiple raids, Nate checked the QUICKHATCH beacon readouts from a terminal in the consulate. That technology was not releasable to the Turks—they were unaware of the redundant system—but all locations were corroborated 100 percent. Benford called on the secure phone and uncharacteristically praised Nate’s performance both in Sevastopol, and in working with the Turks in Istanbul, which he called “satisfactory.” Benford confirmed that the tech team for Phase Three would arrive the next day. Part of Nate’s plan to frame Shlykov had already been running for a time, a denigration ploy so insidious that a chuckling Gable had said Shlykov was already screwed, only he didn’t know it yet. “Good luck, tonight,” Benford had said, then terminated the secure link.

Nate hung up, remembering that Agnes had also wished him good luck after the WOLVERINEs returned by boat to Varna. He didn’t know it, but Agnes had booked a flight a day later than the rest of the team. Nate likewise was waiting for his flight to Istanbul, and was staying one night at the Central Hotel, a tired Romanian Black Sea resort where the lobby, corridors, and rooms smelled of hot elevator oil. Agnes had sneakily taken an adjoining room, and surprised him by pounding on his door while announcing servitoare, housekeeping!

Nate was secretly pleased. He was contemplating a dreary evening alone in his threadbare room watching the Berlin Euro Pop Contest on television. Agnes had other ideas. Whatever servomotor was ticking inside her, the chaste three-day return cruise apparently had spun it up to red-line levels. They made love everywhere but the bed: on the floor, in an armchair, in the bathtub with a sputtering hydro jet, and standing up on the tiny balcony ghost-lit by the neon hotel sign on the roof. Her heady perfume—she told him it was Chanel Cristalle Eau Verte—mingled with the whiff of Bunker C fuel oil from the harbor around the headland. She had whispered czuje miete dla ciebie, I feel mint for you, in colloquial Polish, meaning she had feelings for him. Mint wasn’t the only thing she felt.

Hours later, hands shaking, Nate poured Agnes some bottled water, but she was asleep on the bed, on her back, mouth open in a six-orgasm syncope, hair fanned out on the pillow, her witch’s streak partly visible. Nate floated a blanket over her and sat on the armchair across the room, looking at her breathing. Sleeping with Agnes the first time had been a midnight impulse fueled by pre-op nerves. Tonight it was a celebration, relief at getting out of Russia in one piece, maybe a bittersweet farewell. Nate rubbed his face and groaned. Maybe he wanted to put impediments between him and Dominika, so he wouldn’t—could not—stumble with her again. He resolved to properly act as backup to Gable during meetings in the safe house. He would arrive late, and leave early, making sure Gable was always in the room. He would let Gable explain to DIVA why Nate was acting like a skittish puppy, let him deal with the inevitable outburst. Only one problem: Nate loved Dominika. As if Agnes could hear his thoughts, she mumbled fitfully in her sleep, and turned over. She feels mint for me, thought Nate, miserably.

The next day they were waiting for their separate flights at the airport. In a white blouse, pink skirt, and sandals, Agnes looked cool and collected.

“Do you think I am too old for you?” she asked Nate, who looked up in alarm.

“After last night, I’ll let you know once my chiropractor hammers my spine back into alignment,” said Nate.

“I am being serious,” said Agnes.

“No, I don’t think you’re too old for me,” he said. “But Agnes, there must be somebody in your life.”

“I think there is somebody in your life,” she said, ignoring his question.

“What makes you say that?” said Nate. Scary good radar, he thought.

“Zerkalo dushi,” said Agnes in Russian, searching his eyes. Mirror of the soul, thought Nate. Christ.

“Things are complicated,” said Nate, who had no intention of discussing his seriously contorted personal situation.

“You live in London, isn’t it?” Agnes said.

“And you live in California.”

“Not so far, I think,” she said, not looking at him. Nate didn’t answer.

“Would a visit to London sometime be a bad idea?” Agnes said, then kissed him good-bye.

The Station’s outside line rang with an exultant Hanefi on the other end. “Nate Bey, come quickly; there is a police car waiting for you downstairs.” He was shouting over the sound of gunfire, a lot of it, including automatic weapons.

“Hanefi, where are you?” yelled Nate. “Are you all right?”

“Godamn hell, shit-bitch,” said Hanefi, who was still learning to swear properly in English. “Çabuk olmak, come at once.”

The drive in the dented police car, blue lights flashing and hee-haw siren wailing, driven by a jug-eared twenty-year-old police corporal who pounded the steering wheel when traffic did not part, was transcendental. Gable’s phrase “scared as a sinner in a cyclone” came to mind. Metal ammunition boxes strewn on the rear seat slid back and forth on the curves. They weaved through traffic across the Galata Bridge, and rocketed down the south side of the Golden Horn, past the darkened Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, under the O-1, and into the dingy Eyüp district. The corporal took a steep road up the hill, tires squealing and fenders scraping along the stone guardrail. At one of the switchback curves, the entire sprawl of Istanbul was visible, its city lights bisected by the black slash of the Bosphorus; the end of Europe and the start of Asia. Dominika would be down there, and they’d be together in two days.

The police car locked its brakes and slid to a stop. More police cars were up ahead, stacked behind a big-wheeled Kobra armored car in blue and white TNP colors. The driver shoved two ammo cases into Nate’s hands, took two himself, jerked his head, and started running uphill. It was a steep, narrow street with houses on either side, the windowpanes reflecting the two-score flashing blue lights. The echoing cracks of incessant firing became louder. Clustered at the corner of a wall ahead were a group of TNP officers, some in uniform, others in jeans and leather jackets, peeking around the corner of the wall. Hanefi saw Nate and ran to greet him.

“You bring ammunition,” he said, clapping Nate on the back. The wall across the street was suddenly riddled by bullets that chipped cement and filled the air with dust. Hanefi pulled Nate closer into the lee of the wall.

“Hanefi, what’s going on?”

“Four people, PKK, in top apartment,” said Hanefi, loading a magazine for his MP5. Other officers were digging into the ammunition like kids around a bowl of candy. Nate looked past them. The street was covered in spent casings, thousands of them, brass winking in the flashing lights.

“How long have you been shooting?”

“Many hours; we ran out of ammunition.” He held his weapon out to Nate. “Here, you try.” Nate shook his head. Hanefi barked something in Turkish to another officer, who held out his weapon, a heavier assault rifle. “Try this one.” Nate held up his hands in polite refusal.

A bullhorn blared and the shooting slowed, then stopped. Hanefi pulled Nate by the sleeve to peer around the corner. The small apartment building was bathed in spotlights. The top-floor apartment was marked by thousands of bullet holes, the windows were ragged gaps in the walls, and the concrete balcony railing was chipped and broken. It was a miracle that anyone could survive up there. And this is going on all over Istanbul, thought Nate.

Hanefi nudged Nate and pointed with his chin. Two shadows—police commandos—were sliding slowly headfirst down the roof tiles. At the edge, they would reach over the gutter and throw fragmentation grenades down into the PKK apartment. Before they were in place, a young woman in a red parka ran onto the balcony with an RPG over her shoulder. Hanefi shouted and tried pulling Nate back. The woman aimed at them and fired the missile, but the back blast from the launching charge rebounded in the small space and blew the woman off the balcony. She cartwheeled four stories into a pile of rubble, followed by the missile that arced harmlessly to the ground. Hanefi looked at Nate in amazement. “Bad luck,” said Nate.

The grenades cracked and a thin plume of gray smoke came out of one of the windows. Another boom was followed by a flurry of shots, then silence, then the shrill blast of a whistle. “All over. Let us go up,” said Hanefi.

The interior of the little apartment was an eye-stinging charnel house, with a bullet hole in every square inch of the room. Wallpaper hung curled off the walls, the few pieces of furniture had been reduced to kindling, and a prayer rug smoldered in the corner. Bits of upholstery stuffing floated in the air. Two men lay on the floor on their backs, bloody shirts pulled up to their chins. In the back bedroom a young woman lay between the pulverized wall and a shredded box mattress, her fists clenched and mouth puckered, eyes half-open. Black hair showed beneath a head scarf.

Hanefi looked with interest at Nate’s face, which had gone somewhat pale. He would not make fun of his new American friend. He patted Nate’s shoulder. “It is our job,” he said, holding up four fingers. “Dört, four terrorists, captured dead,” he said using the TNP vernacular.

Shlykov’s covert action had been ruined: twenty-four PKK cells had been wrapped up; the morgues were already full. The Russian munitions had been recovered, and the publicity would be devastating when the weapons would be put on display for the TV cameras. Now let’s take Shlykov for a ride, thought Nate, and then it’s up to Dominika.

About the time Major Shlykov arrived in town to supervise his covert-action arms shipments, the CIA Base in Istanbul had begun transmitting covert-agent electronic-burst messages into the Russian Consulate. Every day for a week, base officers, stiff wires running beneath their jackets and warm battery packs in spandex holsters under their skirts, walked among the shopping crowds on Istiklal Caddesi and past the consulate gate topped with the double-headed eagle of the Russian Federation. They fired three-second, five-watt burst transmissions into the building. The energy bounced invisibly up the ornate marble staircases, ricocheted through the hallways, and rose like clear smoke up to the attic receivers; the consulate was awash in low-powered signals. They were encrypted gibberish, but the signals themselves were detectable and dutifully recorded by Russian SIGINT (signals intelligence) officers who endlessly monitored frequencies across the spectrum. A report was sent to FAO/RF, the Moscow SIGINT headquarters, immediately. The mysterious daily transmissions continued on a regular basis.

A week later, when phone intercepts flagged that Shlykov was traveling from Istanbul to Ankara to confer with the senior rezident, the burst transmissions in Istanbul ceased, and commenced in Ankara. CIA Station officers twice a day drove past the Russian Embassy on Cinnah Caddesi, pushed the recessed buttons, and volleyed the encrypted energy over the embassy fence, through the granite walls, into the elegant Baroque sitting rooms, and out the back of the building to the withered formal gardens behind the embassy. This had not happened before. The astonished Russian SIGINT officers in Ankara also reported their readings to FAO/RF. These reports in turn were sent to the FSB. As a potential counterintelligence matter, neither Shlykov in GRU nor SVR headquarters was privy to the SIGINT reports, nor were they aware that a secret FSB file had been opened on “unidentified encrypted electronic messaging activity in Istanbul.” Signals of this sort were sophisticated and clandestine, and clearly suggested that someone in the Russian diplomatic contingent in Turkey was the recipient. The genetic, reflexive Kremlin assumption that there was a traitor in their midst—a cultural paranoia first introduced by the tsars, nurtured by the Bolsheviks, refined by the Soviets, and perfected by Putin—smoldered in Moscow.

Shlykov returned to Istanbul, and the transmissions ceased in Ankara and again followed him. And when he traveled to Moscow, for consultations regarding his covert-action operation, the transmissions stopped altogether, only to start up again on his return to Turkey, when he touched down at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport. The SIGINT log of these encrypted signals grew and the FSB counterintelligence file got fatter. It was not long until signals analysis matched the transmissions with Shlykov’s movements.

This delighted Gorelikov, whose refined, gracious exterior concealed an inexhaustible capacity for subterfuge and plotting. When Dominika had quietly brought home news of the murder of her North Korean asset, Gorelikov had listened implacably to Shlykov’s dismissive explanation that the North Koreans almost certainly had detected Ri’s treachery through some tradecraft error of Egorova’s and had eliminated the scientist themselves. And as for the missing Sparrow, either the North Koreans had dealt with her, or she had run off with a ski instructor from the Tyrol. Gorelikov later listened to the recording of Blokhin’s voice in the cottage, and had, incongruously, smiled. Additional evidence to hang this GRU apostate, but never a thought for Ioana, Dominika bitterly noted.

Gorelikov took Dominika aside and for a day briefed her on the developments in Istanbul. Shlykov’s operation had imploded, the munitions had been captured, the Turks were apoplectic, and Russia would be embarrassed on the international stage. The president no longer numbered Valeriy Shlykov as one of his favorites. They began choreographing a discreet counterintelligence investigation—SVR would have the lead role in the foreign field—meticulously led by a dutiful Colonel Egorova. “It’s a shame you have to fly all the way to Istanbul; the findings of the investigation are already drafted,” said Gorelikov. “Shlykov is responsible for the OBVAL disaster, for which he must answer, but it is now more serious. He is suspected of espionage. But there it is, appearances matter, and you must play the part.” But then came the sly question Benford had warned her about. “What do you think is going on in Istanbul with these transmissions? Did the Americans suspect something? Why did they focus on Shlykov?”

“In Turkey it could be any of a dozen things; that’s why this covert action was ill-advised,” said Dominika, matter-of-factly. “The Turks certainly have informers inside PKK; perhaps a tradecraft problem with the delivery of weapons; US SIGINT might be listening to chatter.” Gorelikov polished his wire-framed eyeglasses.

“Or we could have a mole in the Kremlin,” he said, softly. Dominika willed her scalp not to creep.

“Always a possibility, but unlikely,” she said. “Everyone in the Council approved the plan.”

“Except for you, Bortnikov, and me,” said Gorelikov.

“I can hardly credit the Chief of FSB working for the opposition, and I know I am not a mole . . .”

“Which leaves me,” said Gorelikov, amused.

“A dangerous counterrevolutionary of the criminal Trotsky gang. Line KR will have to keep an eye on you,” said Dominika, and the moment passed. Is this a ghastly game to tell me he thinks I’m a spy? Take care. Gorelikov was a serpent, tongue flicking, constantly testing the air. That night, she wrote up the details and dead dropped them to Ricky Walters to pass to Benford. She would have to be very careful.

In Istanbul, CIA officers, in addition to sending burst transmissions, had begun marking signals—chalk marks on stone walls, tape on light poles, thumbtacks in trees—along Shlykov’s walking route between his temporary Istanbul apartment and the Russian Consulate. Because Shlykov wasn’t looking for them, he didn’t notice them. Very discreet surveillance of the major, done from the front and in phases, soon determined which cafés and restaurants he favored for solitary lunches and dinners. One of these was in Cicek Pasaji, a covered street arcade with a nineteenth-century Beaux Arts latticework and glass roof. Whenever Shlykov ate there—he habitually ordered kadinbudu köfte, ladies’ thighs köfte, plump lamb and beef meat fingers, fried crispy on the outside and succulent on the inside—one of half a dozen CIA officers sat close by, always facing him, always with a folded newspaper, or a book, or an eyeglass case on the table in plain sight. No contact was ever attempted.

A steady stream of local commercial brochures, advertisements, and flyers were mailed to Shlykov’s address announcing Bosphorus tours, condos for sale in Esentepe, bus excursions to Bulgaria. The junk mail was collected and delivered by his toothless concierge. Shlykov thought nothing of the brochures and threw most of them away, but one or two of them were tossed in desk drawers and forgotten. They all had been lightly sprayed with household insecticide, a chemical component of which is phenolphthalein, a telltale of secret writing developer. There were no messages on this junk mail, all of it stiff and glossy with the dried aerosol patina.

Nathaniel Nash sat in a nondescript Fiat Scudo van parked on a narrow side street in Istanbul with three technical officers from Langley. It was dusk and the final call to prayer had finished minutes ago; the steep Beyoǧlu neighborhood of grimy apartment buildings and first-floor shops was quiet and dark. There were intermittent rainstorms scudding across the city, and the alleyways, stairways, and gutters were periodically awash in a brown chyme, the composition unchanged since the Byzantine Empire. A cat sat under the eaves of a ground-floor apartment window shaking its paw. The van was parked three doors down from a brick-and-stone apartment building with a fabric canopy over double glass doors in front. They were waiting for the crone who was the concierge in the building to leave her little desk in the entrance foyer and walk down to her basement apartment to start dinner for her husband. Instead, she stuck her head out of the door and poked the underside of the bulging canopy with a mop handle to empty it of accumulated rainwater.

Nate and the three entry techs were waiting to break into the personal apartment of Valeriy Shlykov. The van was filled with the collective fragrances of the tool satchels each of them held in their laps: the bitter stench of electric motor oil; the pungency of wood putty and quick-dry paint; the gritty whiff of graphite powder, the sweetness of talcum. The techs, veterans all, sat silently, looking straight ahead; three good ol’ boys, two from the Deep South, who didn’t use aftershave because it could linger on doorknobs and drawer pulls, and who didn’t smoke because they sometimes had to lie on their stomachs in an attic for seventy-two hours straight.

The books had them down as surreptitious-entry techs, but it was less formal than that: these men had jimmied, shimmied, and picked their way into embassies, boudoirs, code rooms, and missile bunkers around the world. They called themselves “rum dubbers” or steel-bolt hackers; their Harley-Davidson and Jack Daniel’s belt buckles had squeezed past laths and joists, under electrified wire, around cable runs, over roof slates covered in snow. Older now, in their fifties and sixties, they traveled less. A new breed—cuticle chewers with laptops—was needed to get past infrared cameras and biometric electronic locks. And the Golden Age of Surreptitious Entry had passed. No modern ops manager in the intelligence community today wanted to authorize a delicate physical-entry operation with career-ending risk written all over it.

But there were exceptions. In Shlykov’s case, the object of this clambake was not to emplace microphones or cameras, nor was it to open safes and quick-copy classified materials with a roll-over camera. Rather, the object of this surreptitious entry was to leave things behind.