The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel by Jason Matthews (24)

A Bit of Groan and Grunt

That is how Simon Benford sent Nathaniel Nash to the Orient. At first, Nate thought the temporary assignment was, besides a blessed reprieve, a form of geographical exile to keep him separated from Dominika. But the next day, when he went with analyst Lucius Westfall to meet Elwood Holder, the Chief of China Operations, and they were briefed on what had happened in Hong Kong, he knew there was a real clambake on, an opportunity so astronomically lucrative that even Benford later agreed that the counterintelligence risks of operating inside Chinese territory were outweighed by the potential gains.

Holder was a thirty-five-year veteran of China Ops, a plank owner, a daaih ban, an esteemed taipan, one of the Agency’s original China hands who spoke fluent Mandarin and wrote both simplified and traditional Chinese with pen or brush. His office walls were decorated with rice-paper banners covered in spidery flowing logograms that Holder himself had painted. Lucius admired a particularly elaborate scroll.

“Sun Tzu, fifth century BC,” said Holder, running his finger down the paper. “In all military affairs, none is more valuable than the spy, none should be more liberally rewarded than the spy, and none should work with greater secrecy than the spy.” He returned to his desk, sat down, and leaned back in his chair.

“Which one of you is Nash?”

Nate nodded.

Holder looked at Westfall. “And you’re Benford’s new PA, from the DI? Good luck with that, and welcome to the Ops Directorate. You’ll note General Tzu did not say ‘In all military affairs, none is more valuable than the analyst’ but at least you’re working with the Dark Prince now.” Lucius said nothing; he was getting used to the jockstrap patois in this side of the building.

Holder was short and stocky with thinning sandy hair and merry blue eyes behind octagonal wire-rimmed glasses, eyes that missed nothing and stopped twinkling when he started talking about taking scalps—recruiting human sources—something he had frequently done around the world, from the Taiwan Straits to the Tiber. Holder’s fabled recruitment in 1985 was of a thirty-year-old telephone technician in the secretariat of the Communist Party of China. In exchange for VCR tapes of all thirty-one Elvis Presley films and a signed photograph of Ann-Margret, he identified the junction box in Beijing serving the Zhuan xian, the encrypted internal telephone system of the 12th Central Politburo. This resulted in the bugging of the line, which produced a stream of astounding code-word intelligence for thirty-six months.

“Hong Kong Station’s been burning up the wires for a week, a dozen immediate restricted-handling cables,” said Holder. “COS Hong Kong is an old whore, a top pro, knows China like the back of his hand, name’s Barnabus Burns. By the way, do not, ever, call him ‘Barn’ for short; he hates the nickname Barn Burns.

“The local Hong Kong ASIS rep, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, called on Burns and made an urgent proposal for a joint op. Seems they’ve been looking for six months at a high-ranking general in the PLA, People’s Liberation Army, a zhong jiang, a middle general, equivalent to lieutenant general. This Chinese general, name’s Tan Furen, comes from Guangzhou in the south. But he’s a big noise in the Zhōngguó Rénmín Jiěfàngjūn Huǒjiànjūn, the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force—PLARF for short—a top intelligence target for years. The PLARF owns all Chinese land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and maintains their nukes, the whole deal.” Holder read from a black-striped folder.

“The Aussies to their delight discovered that General Tan likes to gamble in the casinos of Macao; he’s addicted,” said Holder. “There’s widespread corruption in the PLA. You get general’s rank by shelling out five hundred thousand dollars, and once they pin on your stars you stand to make three times that from skimming contracts and from kickbacks. They’re all dirty as hell.” He rubbed his hands together, as if he were smelling hot-and-sour soup on the stove.

“Tan secretly has been gambling with—and losing—official army funds. The Aussies figure he’s a million dollars in the hole. Beijing finds out, they’ll stand him against a wall and shoot him.”

“How do they know how much he’s lost?” said Westfall.

“ASIS is a small service, but aggressive. They have ears in all the casinos. Gaming in Macao is bigger than in Vegas, and they have it covered. They say Tan is scared to death and desperate, and they want us to bankroll the pitch. We give the general the cash to replenish his cash box, and he starts reporting to us on the PLARF.”

“And we share the take,” said Nate. “That’s a lot of money; he worth it?”

“We’d pay twice that. The Chinese say an ding zi, to push a nail, to recruit a source inside their rocket forces. Real strategic intel.”

“Will he go for it?” said Nate. Holder nodded.

“It’s start spying or get the chop. But there’s a problem. ASIS says the general is a real chicom, a diehard, a true believer. He won’t accept if the pitch comes from the West, especially the United States. It’s complicated, all wrapped up in miàn zi, loss of face, reputation, shame.”

“Seems like he’s not in a position to be picky,” said Westfall.

“You’d think so, but I’ve seen them walk away over saving face, even if it means they go to prison later,” said Holder. “Lost a few good recruitments myself by trying to muscle them, believe me.”

“So how do we sugarcoat it?” said Nate.

Holder pointed at him. “That’s where you come in. Benford volunteered you,” he said. So Benford already had me scoped for the job while he talked about redemption, thought Nate. He smiled to himself.

“We ran traces based on ASIS info,” said Holder. “General Tan was a military attaché in Moscow in the nineties,” said Holder. “He speaks some Russian and likes Russians—there’s a faction in the PLA that still buys into the Sino-Russian friendship bullshit, and he’s one of them.”

“What am I hearing?” said Nate. “A false flag?”

“That’s right,” said Holder. “You pitch Tan in Macao as a friendly SVR officer offering to discreetly help out an ally in exchange for PLARF secrets. The Aussies don’t have a fluent Russian speaker who could pull this off. Benford tells me you speak like a native.” Nate flashed back to when he had played a Russian reports officer with Dominika—it had been her idea—with an Iranian scientist in Vienna. A million years ago.

“I speak it pretty well,” said Nate.

“You gotta speak it better than pretty fucking well,” said Holder. “General Tan smells CIA and he’s out the window. MSS calls it dǎ cǎo jīng shé, beating the grass and startling the snake, telegraphing your intent. We want to avoid that.”

“I’ll try my best,” said Nate. “Is ASIS cool with me making the pitch?”

“COS floated the idea to ASIS of using you as a Russian and they liked it,” said Holder, smiling. “We hide the Western hand, Tan saves face, and we bag a sensitive source inside the PLARF. Epic once-in-a-decade recruitment.” He loves this Wilderness-of-Mirrors shit as much as Benford, thought Nate.

“There’s the small matter of pitching a Chinese lieutenant general in Chinese-controlled Macao,” said Westfall, the innately practical analyst in him showing.

“The Aussies have an access agent in the casino who’s been buttering the general,” said Holder. “They can get him to a quiet restaurant on the beach, out of town. It’s not that tight, operationally. Macao is nothing but casinos, a Special Administrative Region under the control of the Guangzhou MSS, and they thumb their nose at Beijing. They don’t do anything too squirrely to upset the tourist industry—they all make money on the side.”

“As long as they’re not watching the general already, we probably can swing it,” said Nate. “If he says yes, how do we handle him?”

“Just get him into harness and we’ll do the rest,” said Holder, obliquely, which suggested to Nash that Holder already had inside handlers in Beijing. They didn’t have a need to know. “An ASIS case officer in Hong Kong will watch your fanny.” Westfall stirred in his seat.

“I know I’m new to this and all, but I have a question,” Westfall said. “Nash would be on temporary duty in Hong Kong. There’s no diplomatic immunity for TDY personnel if there’s a flap, is there?” Nate winced slightly. Westfall didn’t know better.

“Nothing’s perfect,” said Holder. “This is too big not to try.” Westfall blinked at him. Holder pointed to a framed scroll with Chinese characters on the wall behind him.

“Know what that says? ‘If I offend you, I’ll help you pack.’ Old Confucian proverb.”

Eighty-four hundred kilometers east from Elwood Holder’s Headquarters office, Gelendzhik Airport in Russia’s Krasnodar Southern Federal District was bounded on the west by a low range of tree-covered maritime mountains, and on the east by the broad horseshoe-shaped Gelendzhilskaya Bay, which emptied out into the Black Sea, a deep-blue sheet of motionless glass this time of year. Dominika was met at the bottom of the stairs of the Sukhoi 100 by a blond courtesy hostess who looked sideways at the stunning dark-haired woman who walked with a barely perceptible limp, and who was dressed in what the hostess identified as the European style. She was going to “the cape”—no one called it Putin’s Palace out loud—which meant she was someone important. But the tailored jacket, the shoes, the expensive sunglasses meant that she was neither from some clunky ministry in Moscow, nor one of the pneumatic “hospitality greeters” brought in for long weekend parties, the majority of whose clothing involved sequins or feathers. In Russia, people who do not fit into familiar categories are usually dangerous and best left alone, so the hostess said nothing as she made sure this unsmiling beauty was securely belted into her plush seat in the AW139 VIP helicopter, closed the door, dogged down the handle, and stood with heels together and waved until the twin engines began a low growl and the rotors began turning, at which point she held on to her pillbox hat and ran.

The helicopter rose, banked sharply, straightened out, and followed the rocky coast for ten minutes before banking sharply again over a wooded peninsula that ended in a crumbling bluff down to the sea. Dominika caught a glimpse of a massive Italianate mansion surrounded by trees and flanked by formal geometric gardens that extended from the main house in all directions. Putin’s Palace. As they descended, she picked out paths through the forest that led to a dozen smaller houses, some of them perched on the edge of the seaside cliff. On land, another hostess with a clipboard—she was short, dark, and dour—rode with Dominika in the backseat of an electric cart behind two bulletheads in black suits.

Since she had been gifted a luxurious dacha by her new patron Vladimir—“Vova” was one diminutive of his name, a familiarity reserved for mothers, grandmothers, and mistresses—Dominika had followed Gorelikov’s suggestion to fly down for the weekend to see the dacha, and acknowledge the honor. The president earlier had told her about the gala event there in late fall, a time of glorious weather on the southern coast. “Friends and colleagues will gather there in early November for the Unity Day holiday on the fourth,” Putin had said. Unity Day was a traditional holiday reinstated in 2005, originally commemorating the Russian victory in 1612 over Polish invaders. An extra holiday and a few wreaths placed on the monuments kept the popular approval ratings up, and was cause for a two-day bacchanal at Putin’s Palace. “I expect you to come and enjoy the scenery,” said Putin, with a half smile first perfected in AD 41 by Caligula.

“Go down there now, and get the lay of the land,” Gorelikov had added confidentially, rubbing his hands, blue halo pulsing. “It will impress the jealous ones that he gave you a dacha. They’ll all assume the obvious, and will be afraid of you.” He’s grooming me to be Director, thought Dominika. I wonder when he will become my svodnik, my pimp.

The dacha—her dacha—was a modern-stark three-story cement villa decorated in sleek Scandinavian style, with swoopy chairs in white leather and stainless steel. The main floor consisted of a foyer, a living room with sliding glass doors that led to the balcony looking out over the cliff face and the sea, and a modern galley kitchen in white with stainless-steel highlights. The top floor was one broad master bedroom with a two-acre bed and its own picture window and balcony, while the bottom floor had two additional bedrooms and a small cedar-lined banya, a Russian steam room. Looking out over the balcony railing, Dominika could see a stony goat path beside the villa that hugged the cliff face and wound its way down to a boulder-strewn beach seventy meters below. The villa was perched on the side of the incline, and the balconies virtually soared over the cliff.

Bozhe, God, this was beautiful. Dominika opened all the sliding doors to smell the sea air and the fragrant pines, took off her shoes, opened cupboard doors, bounced on the bed, and took off her jacket and skirt and lay in her underwear on a chaise lounge on the upper balcony in the warm October sun. She found a bottle of Georgian champagne in the small refrigerator and poured herself a glass, and sat outside again looking at the distant sea and listening to the cicadas buzzing in the trees. There were no other houses visible, no man-made sounds at all. In Moscow it was almost freezing, and some frost dusted the rooftops. Here it was still summer.

This was luxury, this was privilege, this was a universe away from the pall of Moscow. The sea breeze tossed the gauzy white curtains as Dominika stepped into the gray-tiled walk-in shower, and she sniffed at the rose-scented soap, and let the hot water loosen her muscles, and she turned, trying to imagine Nate standing close, soaping her back, but Blokhin was there instead, grinning like Shaitan, water coursing off his face, his paws bloody, and Dominika shook the image away, suddenly cold despite the hot water, and closed her eyes.

She bitterly realized that this modern villa soaring above the sea was lipovyy, literally a lime blossom, but figuratively it meant something false, a fake, a forgery. Her grandmother from Saint Petersburg used to whisper to her stories from the bibliya, the Book, about temptation. This dacha was nothing more than Satan’s plate of silver in the desert that tempted Saint Anthony. Vladimir Putin would trade this house for her loyalty, the Directorship of the SVR for her conscience, and her induction as a silovik for her soul. She stood dripping wet in the shower, shivering. The villa now was gray and ugly, the sunlight harsh and revealing, the cicadas a painful buzzing in her ears. She had come this weekend out of curiosity, to see her dacha, to acknowledge Putin’s gift, to get away from the crenellated walls of the Kremlin. Now she knew there would be no rest in this cement lockbox. She would have to suffer a savorless night and return to Moscow tomorrow on the shuttle flight.

Dressed in a light sweaterdress and wearing flats, Dominika walked at dusk along the paved path toward the massive main house—through the trees she saw its lights ablaze on every floor; the staff would be preparing for the upcoming Unity Day gala. As she walked in the failing light, she saw the cherry glow of a cigarette in the woods, then another on the other side. The grounds were swarming with security. A bruiser sat in a cart where the path crossed another. He watched her walk past him without nodding or acknowledging her.

Putin’s personal bodyguard belonged to the SBP, the Presidential Security Service, which was an autonomous element of the FSO, Federalnaya Sluzhba Okhrany, the Federal Protective Service, a reorganized agency loyal only to Vladimir Putin and tasked exclusively with the protection of the Russian Federation, which meant anything the siloviki wanted it to mean. Dominika had heard the rumors about the president’s outwardly blasé but secret fear of assassination; about the plastic containers of prepared meals, sealed and signed by food tasters; and about the most-trusted men of his protective detail, uncouth new millionaires who had been given blocks of shares in the State-run petroleum, manufacturing, and railroad conglomerates as a reward for their loyalty. She wondered if the towering irony was lost on Vladimir Putin that the leader of a modern nation, with nuclear weapons and a space program, feared political murder as the tsars before him feared the silken strangler’s cord. Even Josef Stalin felt it. He was famously quoted as saying, “Do you remember the Tsar? Well, I’m like a tsar.”

The meticulously manicured inner courtyard of the palace was massive. A white marble fountain bubbled in the center, and ropes of white lights hung from poles and were strung along the second-floor windows of the mansion. Dominika was directed to a small private dining room where she was served in silence by a waitress with downcast eyes. The selection of dishes went on for pages, with ingredients that were not to be found in all of Russia, not even in the five-star restaurants of Moscow or Saint Petersburg. She chose a tuna carpaccio with grapefruit and fennel like she’d had in Rome, just to see what they would do with it. The tuna, sliced paper-thin, came on a large chilled plate dusted with fennel fronds and drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. It was delicious.

Dominika felt slightly ridiculous sitting alone in a little dining room, but the mansion and the entire compound—including outdoor amphitheater, spa club, screening room, indoor and outdoor pools, library, and massive barbecue deck—was deserted, the lull before the president and scores of guests arrived in November. She was resigned to walk back to her dacha through the dark, watched by eyes in the woods, and go to bed. She would think about Nate, as she always did at night, and wish he were there with her lying on the balcony chaise lounge, working on getting a moon burn. She got up from the table and walked down the hall toward the exit when she heard a voice behind her calling in accented Russian.

“Excuse me, Miss, but do you have the time?” A young man in his twenties with dark hair and blue eyes was standing in an open door. He wore a work shirt and jeans, was muscular but thin, with strong forearms holding up either side of the door frame. His face was ruddy and unshaven, and his mouth was more like a woman’s mouth, with full lips.

“You are wearing a watch on your left wrist,” said Dominika, intuitively replying in English. “An instrument often put to use determining what time it is.” This elicited a thousand-watt smile from the young man, which was, Dominika had to admit, somewhat charming.

“You speak English, good, my Russian’s terrible,” he said, smiling. “I was asking if you had the time . . . to join us for a drink.” Another incandescent smile, naughty, cherubic. “There’s no one around this place and we’ve been here for two weeks.” Intrigued, Dominika walked back toward him and peeked into the door. It was a cafeteria, a dining room for staff. Two other young men and two women were the only ones in the room sitting at a table littered with plates and glasses. Four empty wine bottles were clustered together. They were all smoking and an overflowing ashtray was in the center of the table. The people around the table smiled—they were from Poland—and the young man held out a chair and poured her a glass of wine. Dominika introduced herself as a visiting event organizer, something vague.

The charming young man was Andreas. He was the leader of the team from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts Department of Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art. He introduced his colleagues, all art-restoration experts, attractive, attentive. Everyone spoke at once, all smart, new generation Poles who knew English well (in the generation since the Soviets withdrew, East European schoolchildren no longer willingly studied Russian). The academy in Warsaw had been hired by Rosimushchestvo, the Federal Agency for State Property Management, to do emergency restoration work in the mansion on a large number of ceiling and wall murals. Pipes in the walls had leaked or burst even as the palace was being completed, requiring restoration on a new building, which Dominika silently thought was a metaphor for the Russian Federation—broken before completed.

The Poles had been working in the empty palace overseen by scowling security thugs and a cavillous Russian foreman, and had cabin fever. They were apparently unconcerned about speaking freely.

“The murals are ghastly,” giggled Anka, a blonde.

“A Sardinian artist painted them when the place was built,” said Stefan, with a serious face. “Russians are the only ones who would think they were elegant.” Anka shushed him with a slap on the arm. Dominika smiled to show she was not offended.

“It turns out that Russian plumbers connect pipes as well as Sardinians paint,” said Andreas. “They’ve had burst water pipes everywhere, a lot of panels were damaged, and we’re here to repair the plaster and restore the paintings.” Dominika sipped her wine, interested.

Sitting at the table with these fresh-faced Poles, their country once a satellite state but now eagerly facing the challenges of a future where many things were possible, Dominika thought of her mother in her tiny State-provided Moscow apartment with the sooty heat-curdled wallpaper over the radiators that were always lukewarm, never hot, and her late father’s university photo on the mantelpiece alongside the photo of her mother standing in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, serenely receiving applause, her violin under her arm, and the little wooden box on the outside windowsill to keep food colder than any freezer, and the tiny table with an opened tin of sardinka, sardines in oil flecked with blood, a day-old heel of black bread spread with white lard instead of butter. This is what the munificence of Vladimir Putin had given the people of Russia, while water cascaded down the frescoes of his Black Sea palace.

“How much longer will you be here?” she asked. “They’re getting ready for a big gathering in November.” The Poles rolled their eyes.

“We know. That smelly foreman is always telling us to work faster,” said Stefan. “But there’s too much damage. We’ll probably need more people to come from Warsaw. The Russians don’t care, and they pay what we ask. We’ve heard this is the president’s house.”

“It’s best not to speculate,” said Dominika, with a wink. The Poles all laughed. It was a merry party. A glass of wine later, Andreas asked Dominika if she would like to see some of the murals they were working on. They walked up a magnificent double spiral staircase into a series of long corridors with vaulted painted ceilings. Every light seemed to be on, but the place was deserted. Where was security? Aluminum scaffolding ran along one water-stained wall. Plastic sheets were taped everywhere. Andreas stood close to one panel, his long fingers tracing a line, his face intent.

“This is just mechanical restoration, a matter of renewing new pigment that has been damaged. It is nothing like restoring an altar screen painted by Giotto in 1305. Nothing.” Dominika saw the fire in his eyes. He turned and caught her looking at him, and colored slightly.

“You should see how special it can be. Following the master’s brushstrokes, cleaning the dirt and varnish of the ages, seeing the blue he mixed with his own hand come back to the light, it’s magical.” He bashfully avoided looking at her.

They walked from one grand room to the next, gold leaf glimmering in the bright light, chandeliers hanging heavy, one after the other, along the endless length of the rooms. Exquisite ceramic bowls filled glass-fronted armoires and silk drapes were tied back with satin ropes. Farther down the corridor, Andreas put his hand lightly on Dominika’s shoulder, cocked his head, and opened a massive double door. They entered an enormous bedroom with a gilded ceiling, intricate parquet floors, and a massive canopy bed draped with brocaded curtains. Antique furniture filled the room, the boudoir of the Sun King.

“We had to repair the medallions on the ceiling,” Andreas said, looking up. “This is the president’s bedroom; what do you think?”

“It’s grand, isn’t it?” said Dominika, noncommittally. There was a possibility that these rooms were monitored somehow. Andreas bent toward her and whispered in her ear.

“I think it’s obscene,” he said. “No one should live like this, not with how people in your country struggle.” He straightened, looked at her, and smiled. “But I’m just an art technician, what do I know?”

An hour later, Andreas’s slim body glowed in the moonlight slanting through the sliding doors of her dacha. Dominika lay on top of him, her back bathed in sweat, her toes cramping, and her hair pointing in all directions. “For an art technician, you know quite a lot,” she said.

It had come in a rush, beyond her control, no, she had not wanted to control it. Andreas had walked her back to the dacha, and had accepted a glass of champagne. Dominika was in a state; the opulence of Putin’s Palace had sickened her, and all the gold leaf had stuck in her throat. Her life was chaos. She was surrounded by Gorelikov’s poisonous charm, and by Putin’s covetousness, and by the unrelenting pressure of being a spy, and by Benford’s misanthropy, and by the tear in her heart over Bratok, and by the uncertain ache for Nate and, Chyort, goddamn it, by being alone, always alone, beset with requirements and assignments, each one more critical, or more urgent, or more deadly than the last. The Kremlin was still the hoggish preserve of larcenous usurpers who with each year, with each stolen ruble, doomed her Russia to future deprivations as vast as the Siberian tundra. These hogs, and this Hog Palace. They belonged in a skotoboynya, an abattoir.

Her head swam as she had walked up to Andreas, put her hand behind his neck, and mashed her mouth on his—there was no thought of being a Sparrow, and no thought about her genuine love for Nate—and she didn’t care what Andreas thought, and she paid no heed to the conventions, she just wanted passion, and juddering haunches, and the taste and smell of him, and she locked her heels behind his back and kissed him until the pipes broke and melted the murals and set her legs to shaking. Later she hoped she hadn’t bitten his lower lip too badly.

Andreas didn’t know who she was, or what exactly had happened, but the jungle survival instinct in his forebrain told him he probably shouldn’t spend the night. Dominika didn’t care when he tiptoed out. What Bratok Gable had once called “to horizontalize” was what she had needed. Thinking about Gable reminded her of how much she missed him.

Then thinking about Bratok made her think of the faceless mole in Washington who, if Benford didn’t catch him, would soon be reading her name on a list of CIA’s Russian clandestine assets, and the FSB arrest teams in their black Skoda vans would fan out through Moscow, and men with faces like canines would ring doorbells and pull suspects down the stairwells and into the vans for the drive to Lefortovo, where their guilt would soon be established. Dominika wondered if she shouldn’t start sleeping in her clothes so she wouldn’t be in a nightgown when they dragged her into the street.