The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel by Jason Matthews (3)

Bread in the Oven

Twelve years ago, when LTJG Audrey Rowland, in the suite of the Metropol Hotel, told Kremlin recruiter Anton Gorelikov to go fuck himself after he had proposed an arrangement by which she would share classified information on US Navy weapons research projects with Russian military intelligence in exchange for cash payments and discreet career assistance, Gorelikov was delighted. In the handbook of intelligence recruitments, this blasphemy was not a refusal. The young woman had not said no and, more important, she had not indignantly declared her intention to report the pitch to American counterintelligence officials, which would have definitively blown the approach. Her thirty-minute dalliance with an SVR Sparrow clearly was a reportable contact that would have had grave consequences for her promising navy career. Gorelikov assessed that she would be motivated by her desire to keep the episode secret. There was something more, he thought. This young woman was ambitious, and she already had shown herself to be a brilliant researcher in a critical program, a gold-plated skill that would guarantee rapid advancement in a male-dominated US Navy, which clearly was important to her. She also carried some as-yet undefined baggage regarding men, which perhaps manifested itself in her sexual behavior, even at her young age. Ambition leavened by ego, seasoned by a forbidden taste for tribadism. A potent recruitment cocktail. He had let her consider overnight—in the espionage lexicon otherwise colloquially known as leaving the bread in the oven.

When Audrey Rowland the next day archly stipulated that she would limit her reporting strictly to the railgun project, Gorelikov graciously agreed to her condition. He knew the hook was set. Most agents start by declaring moral limits to their treason, insisting on close-ended arrangements, usually limited to a single topic, in exchange for keeping their original transgressions secret. What none of them immediately realized was that agreeing to provide any secrets to Moscow multiplied the initial infraction a hundredfold, enveloping the agent in the spider’s web for as long as the Russians stipulated, or until she lost access, or until her luck ran out and the mole hunters called her in for the inexorable interviews. Gorelikov knew from long experience that the inevitable outcome—the universal fate of all agents—was that Audrey eventually would be blown by careless tradecraft at the hands of a ham-fisted GRU handler or, more likely, by a CIA source inside GRU who would report the existence of a Russian mole in the US Navy. The goal, therefore, had been to compartment the case, and run the asset for as long as possible, extracting as much intelligence as quickly as was secure. Audrey Rowland’s survival as a reporting source was not Gorelikov’s bureaucratic responsibility, but he told himself he’d rather it be handled by the SVR, a service more adept at handling foreign sources, or better yet, by an anonymous illegal, impossible to trace and trebly compartmented.

Now the lofty Vice Admiral Rowland—encrypted MAGNIT—nevertheless had defied the actuarial odds for agent survival. She had been reporting for twelve years—there had been breaks in contact, unsuccessful turnovers to unacceptable new handlers, and a hiatus after a security scare—but she had been on the books since her recruitment in the Metropol.

VADM Rowland had, as Gorelikov predicted, long ago become accustomed to the act of espionage. She initially rationalized the treason by telling herself that sharing science with Russia would level the technology playing field, engender mutual confidence, and actually lessen the chance of a third world war, a conflict no sane person thought would be survivable for either side. She enjoyed the florid notes of thanks and admiration from astonished Russian scientists praising her technical brilliance, just as she reveled in the yearly meetings with Uncle Anton, who was elegant, well dressed, and urbane, and could discuss art, or music, or philosophy as well as the limits of shipborne phased array radar, or the megawatt generating capacity of the Zumwalt-class destroyer.

The relationship between agent and masters matured. As MAGNIT’s performance continued unabated, and her reliability ratings remained at the highest level—all services constantly assess their canaries, for the first sign of trouble in a case is an anomalous change in intel production—Gorelikov, at Putin’s direction, began parallel handling: GRU officers handled MAGNIT inside the United States, although they were little more than mailmen, collecting drops and passing requirements. Gorelikov, however, began meeting MAGNIT during her annual personal leave, her one break from her otherwise total devotion to the laboratories, Special Access Programs, personnel management, and budget-oversight duties that consumed her. Everyone knew that stork-like Admiral Rowland chose rugged campestral destinations for her solo monthlong holiday travels: hiking in Nepal; photo safaris in Tanzania; camping in Jamaica; or kayaking down the Amazon. To colleagues unaccustomed to seeing rawboned Audrey Rowland in anything but her uniform, vacation photos of her in hiking shorts, boots, cargo pants, or a wet suit usually raised eyebrows and occasioned muttered comparisons to Ichabod Crane.

Meetings with Anton were arranged on the margins of Audrey’s exotic vacations, in luxurious rented houses in the nearest large cities to avoid extra travel and incriminating stamps in her passport. The agent’s initial, delusional rationalization for spying evolved under the philosophical tutelage of Uncle Anton, who sought to keep Audrey motivated. The notion of “level playing fields” seemed less relevant in the New Cold War of active measures and cyberoperations. Anton instead often raised the inequity of the system for women in the navy, drawing from Audrey’s progressively less-guarded comments about a childhood clearly and completely dominated by an overbearing father, a rakish naval aviator who cowed his quiescent wife and as much as told Audrey he would have preferred a son. If her father were alive today, Audrey told Anton, he would have to salute her. Anton agreed that women had the same problem in Russia: forced by society, customs, and institutions to let men steal emotional strength away from them. Anton’s wry empathy struck a chord in Audrey. What she was doing—passing secrets, meeting furtively, accepting payment from the Kremlin—she was doing for herself, and she was doing it to excel in her career despite the men, despite the system. The growing balance in her Center-managed accounts—she already had five million dollars’ worth of the Kremlin’s euros, Krugerrands, and uncut diamonds—was further personal validation that this was due her.

Anton recognized that the notion of espionage as an engine of Audrey’s emancipation was a potent control factor. Additional control naturally came from her sexual appetites. Despite liberalizations in the US armed forces, Anton continually harped on the necessity of keeping her predilection for female lovers a secret lest she derail her career. The closeted world that Audrey inhabited kept her in an itchy state and made her a better agent: nervy, edgy, and resentful. Her annual vacations abroad were delicious opportunities to spot, pursue, and bed tantalizing lovers. Anton several times had to intercede with local authorities when sessions with Audrey and a local partner became too spirited—Audrey on the boil occasionally became physical. Anton even arranged for forged-alias identity cards to keep her true name out of local police blotters if things got out of control. The sex was a handling problem, but it was worth the bother as a tool to control MAGNIT, for when she was back in Washington behind her desk at ONR, the Office of Naval Research, broad stripes on her sleeves and three stars on her collar, she was by necessity benignly celibate, and had to live the part.

Anton even advised her to eschew battery-operated boyfriends at home because she was assigned a live-in navy steward and cook in the gabled Victorian Quarters B on Admiral’s Row at the Washington Naval Yard in SE Washington. He sternly told her that her snow-white image as a laudably asexual professional would be sullied if her staff found any sex toys, and rumors would quickly circulate about the wild-haired, three-star stoker in the attic at midnight with a 220 V massager making the lights flicker and scaring the mice. The same applied when Audrey one year discovered spicy Thai cucumber salad while on a temple tour in northern Thailand, and announced she would have her cook in Washington prepare it often. During their meeting in the swanky Anantara Resort in provincial Chiang Mai, Anton sternly told her to leave the contents of the reefer crisper alone; the household staff would be bound to notice missing cucumbers. Audrey laughed at the image. After so many years, Uncle Anton could talk to her about such things freely.

Between her sustaining foreign meetings with Uncle Anton, MAGNIT met once a month in Washington with GRU handlers who were military intel officers from the Russian Embassy on Wisconsin Avenue. Covered as run-of-the-mill military attachés, GRU spooks rarely ran true clandestine sources, inhabiting instead the margins of classic intelligence of elicitation, open-source collection, and technology transfer. The meetings were held in suburban parks and along nature trails and greenswards in Washington and suburban Maryland and Virginia. These meetings were little more than five-minute brief encounters during which Audrey would pass her intel and send messages to Uncle Anton. Audrey’s quantitative mind took to the challenge of finding imaginative meeting sites, ones that she could surveil from a distance to ensure the GRU dolt-of-the-month hadn’t dragged FBI surveillance with him. Audrey had discussed the fine points of site casing with Anton—her tutor in so many things—and had become quite adept. Audrey had lost count of the endless discs, thumb drives, digital cameras, hard drives, and, occasionally, sheaves of physical documents, bound volumes, and printouts on every aspect of naval-weapons research, antisubmarine warfare, ship design and radar, stealth technology, and encrypted communications she dumped in the laps of her handlers. After twelve years in harness, she couldn’t have accurately listed the sum total of the secrets she had passed the Russians. She really didn’t care. The three stripes on her uniform coat were reason enough to continue.

A source such as MAGNIT unquestionably was the jewel in the GRU crown, as well as a constant burden on the collective abilities of GRU Headquarters, commonly known as the Aquarium. From the beginning, Anton Gorelikov had been secretly assigned by Putin to monitor the MAGNIT case, and observe the quality and durability of GRU tradecraft. When MAGNIT received her third star, Gorelikov none-too-gently began prying the case away from the military, eventually to be assigned to an illegals officer in New York who would be anonymous, invisible, and inviolate. At that time, the MAGNIT cryptonym would be changed and the files tightly restricted. Gorelikov also had his eye on SVR Chief of Counterintelligence Colonel Egorova, who he thought eventually could share MAGNIT handling duties abroad, based on her previous experience in street operations and counterintelligence.

President Putin had for years been on a low simmer for his counterintelligence chief, the former busty ballerina, since the night he had visited Dominika’s room in the Constantine Palace at midnight and casually fondled the lace bodice of her nightgown while ordering her to fly to Paris and eradicate her chief, the psychopath Zyuganov, who had gotten on Putin’s bad side. The president had not forgotten how Egorova’s nipples had responded to his touch, could not forget the faint scratching of the dockyard rivets swelling beneath the lace, and how her lashes fluttered in coy arousal. He would own her eventually, it was inevitable. He had intentions of promoting Egorova in the near future, but not yet. And handling MAGNIT could wait: the mole’s continued production was critical. Gorelikov assured Putin this was just the beginning: as the US Navy would founder and disintegrate, so would the United States. “Chto bylo, to proshlo I bylyom poroslo, what used to be will be gone and overgrown with grass,” said Gorelikov to Vladimir.