The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel by Jason Matthews (8)

Polestar of Humanity

Two aides escorted her down the brilliantly lighted corridor, while Dominika composed her features for a last-minute meeting with Gorelikov, probably routine, but she always half expected the room would be full of security goons gathered there to arrest her. The life of a spy.

She was on the third floor, residential wing of the Senate building, where Lenin and Stalin both had maintained comfortable apartments and where Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, in 1932 committed suicide. With a revolver probably, thought Dominika, after she realized she was married to the messenger of Lucifer on Earth. An aide knocked on a plain wooden door, waited a beat, and then indicated that she should go in. Anton Gorelikov stood from behind the desk in his Kremlin office, a corner room on the north angle of the three-sided Senate building. The office was spacious, lined with bookcases, and richly carpeted in deep red. An ornate crystal chandelier hung from the center of the ceiling. Gorelikov’s desk was littered with papers and folders in assorted colors. How many other operations are you hatching around the world? Dominika thought. Today Gorelikov wore a blue shadow plaid suit by Kiton, a light-blue shirt by Mastai Ferretti, and black knit Gitman Bros. tie. He was more elegant than a London banker—no match for the damp tubs of suet on the Kremlin Security Council.

“Ready for your trip?” Gorelikov said, arms outstretched in greeting, like a grandfather welcoming a grandchild back home for spring break. Dominika shook his hand and sat gingerly in a plush leather chair in front of his desk, crossed her legs, and told herself not to bounce her foot.

Gorelikov had read Dominika’s New York ops proposal—a document outlining alias identity, clandestine travel, and meeting protocols with the illegal—which she had wired directly to him last night from SVR headquarters in Yasenevo via an embargoed privacy channel. “Excellent plan, Colonel, excellent tradecraft, quite satisfactory.” He beamed at her as the blue halo around his head shone and pulsed. Strange. He normally didn’t vibrate like this; Gorelikov had some other villainy in mind, she was sure of it. “Sergeant Blokhin is making his own travel arrangements, and he will contact you on arrival. He will lightly countersurveil for you in New York City, but will not, repeat not, accompany you to the meeting with SUSAN the illegal. I made that quite clear to him and Major Shlykov both. If you have any trouble with Blokhin following instructions, abort the meeting rather than risk SUSAN.” Dominika nodded, thinking how in the world she could stop Blokhin from doing anything he wanted to do. Her self-defense moves in Systema could not match his brute strength.

Dominika had done a little research on Iosip Blokhin. He had served five years in Afghanistan, where in his twenties he led the Spetsnaz Storm 333 assault in 1979 on the Tajbeg Palace to depose Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, killing more than two hundred presidential bodyguards. Unofficial reports documented that he had hung the naked body of the president’s mistress from the balustrade of the palace balcony as a message to the people of Kabul: the Soviets were now in town. Blokhin then reportedly swung the president’s five-year-old son by the heels against the wall, resolving any questions regarding primogeniture.

But Blokhin was neither a hallucinating veteran nor a psychotic executioner. Dominika was surprised to read that after the war, Blokhin completed noncommissioned officer’s command school, trained with fraternal Special Forces units abroad, learned Vietnamese, and wrote a well-received article on small-unit tactics that had been accepted and included in a classified edition of the newsletter of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Frunze Military Academy. And he showed black bat wings of evil. Savage or savant? She’d have to take care.

Blokhin and Gorelikov, two ends of the spectrum. Dominika looked out the curtained window over the crenellations onto Red Square and the onion domes of St. Basil’s cathedral and the just-visible roof of Lenin’s mausoleum, hard against the Kremlin wall. The wax mummy of V. I. Lenin under glass in that flowered bier no longer influenced events in Novorossiya, Putin’s New Russia, but she wondered whether Gorelikov stood at this window and telepathically communed with Lenin and the other visionaries in repose just below in the Kremlin necropolis—Suslov, Dzerzhinsky, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Stalin, the Vozhd, the Master of Mayhem. Did they speak to him from the grave? Did they coach him in the tenets of deceit and betrayal? Gorelikov found the folder, and came around his desk to sit beside Dominika in a matching armchair.

They spent the next two hours discussing the mission, which Dominika did not need—she could put together an ops plan in her sleep. No, this was Gorelikov co-opting her, drawing her close, offering his affinity and support, she knew. She remembered what Benford had once told her about Kremlin allegiances: Soviet officials used to say that the beginning of one’s ruin was the day one became Stalin’s favorite. Gorelikov gazed up in thought at the chandelier above his head as Dominika spoke. Like every chandelier in the Kremlin, it was wired with a tiny 24-bit/48 kHz digital microphone in the bobeche, the fluted glass cup from which the crystal pendants hung, so she was speaking to the president at the same time.

She would fly from Paris to Toronto and travel by rail on the Maple Leaf down the Hudson River Valley. US Immigration controls were not as stringent at train stations as at airports. The next matter of business: communications.

Dominika’s primary mission was to pass two special, 256-bit encrypted EKHO phones to SUSAN designed by Line T to synchronize only with each other, and to defy geolocation by frequency hopping simultaneously between cell towers. SUSAN would give one of the phones to MAGNIT during a personal meet, and the secure commo link would be established. With the delivery of the EKHO phones, MAGNIT, henceforth, would communicate only with SUSAN, an untraceable person, an anonymous American citizen, unknown to the FBI or CIA. Even if personal meetings occasionally were necessary, security would be preserved.

During her time in the United States, Dominika would have no way securely to communicate with the Kremlin from an official installation—the rezident in New York City at the Russian Consulate on East Ninety-First Street was not briefed and would be unaware of Dominika’s presence in the city. She would be on her own, a point that displeased Shlykov and moved him to insist that Blokhin stay close. Not likely, she thought.

Gorelikov handed Dominika an envelope with a description of a meeting site located on an island off the coast of New York City called Staten. “An island?” asked Dominika. “How do I get there to meet SUSAN?”

Gorelikov flipped through the pages. “There apparently is a ferryboat to this Staten Island from Manhattan. The illegal knows how to operate in the city. I’m sure the site is secure.” He handed Dominika a small black-and-white ID photo of SUSAN, and Dominika was surprised to see an attractive blond woman with reading glasses. “This officer has been in the United States since the late nineties, she is a top pro, our best illegal. Her legend is impenetrable,” said Gorelikov, reading from the folder. “She has a position of influence—she is an editor at one of the top liberal magazines in Manhattan, widely known and respected in her profession. Her colleagues are totally unsuspecting. They have no idea they have been working beside an SVR officer all these years. It is perfect cover.

“If necessary, you may initiate contact by calling SUSAN’s sterile number from your nonattributable cell phone, but only in an emergency. Conversely, if I want to send you a message via SUSAN, she in turn can trigger a meeting by calling you. Here are the numbers, recognition paroles, and meeting schedules. Simple, straightforward.” Dominika tried to palm the photo—Benford would sell his firstborn to get his hands on SUSAN—but Gorelikov took it back.

“You’ll receive a full trip report,” said Dominika. After I brief Gable and Benford. With her SRAC transmitter damaged by the gopnik’s skull, Dominika would have to wait until she arrived in New York to rendezvous with her handlers and tell them these details.

“I have every confidence in you,” said Gorelikov, looking at his watch, an elegant, wafer-thin Audemars Piguet Millenary Quadriennium with an openwork face, the intricate movement visible, like Gorelikov’s mind, minutely whirring, oscillating, and pendulating.

New York, New York. It was a dream. Dominika—in French alias Sybille Clinard—flew from Paris to Toronto, then rode the slow Maple Leaf train down the scenic Hudson Valley, stirring the American gothic ghosts of Sleepy Hollow, and drowsy Dutchmen. Dominika had researched the city and was excited to see it all. On the train, US border agents didn’t look twice at her, and she had felt no fear. Pulling her suitcase across the concourse at Penn Station felt like home, but there were more people on the Moscow metro and the stations were grander. This rather grubby underground terminal couldn’t compare with the magnificent Kiyevskaya Station on the Arbat line, with its mosaics and chandeliers. There were shops and music here, a man with a hat was dancing for tips, and an old woman stopped and started dancing with him. Americans. Russians were more reserved, more serious, and they dressed up to go out in the city. These New Yorkers were half-naked. Dominika trudged up the stairs, pushed through the doors, came out onto the street, and stopped, frozen.

The roar of the city enveloped her like a wave, the traffic on Seventh Avenue like a river in flood, the sun blotted out by the buildings—towering, majestic, glass canyons filling the sky in all directions, an impossible concentration of them, and their mass pressed down on her. Dominika craned her neck to look up at them like a derevenshchina, a hayseed from the country, not caring. To be sure, Moscow was a city, so too Paris, Rome, London, Athens, but nothing like this. This was someplace without equal, electric and buzzing, a polestar of humanity. Dominika was like a mouse inside a violin, claws gripping tight, stunned by noise and surrounded by vibration. She shook her head. She knew the name and address of her hotel, had memorized the walking route there, and she needed to find a secure telephone to call Bratok, but first she wanted to walk, to see everything. This great city was America, this energy, this industry, this overarching freedom. This is what she aspired to for Russia. This is why she was spying for CIA and this defined her nutro, the impossible-to-explain Russian concept of a person’s inner being.

She threaded through pedestrians on the sidewalk, and as if to match the frenzy of these streets, unrelated thoughts came to her voley-nevoley, all in a rush. My God, how do you check for opposition coverage on these streets? Was the shashlik from these food trucks edible? Did they have gopniki, street toughs, in New York? It would be impossible to pick out surveillance in this crush of bobbing heads, faces of every color and every ethnicity, appraising eyes, twitching hands, and shuffling feet. Overhead a fog bank of peoples’ colors, indistinguishable, useless, was overwhelming. As Chief of Line KR counterintelligence, she knew how her colleagues in the New York rezidentura blithely reported managing operations on these streets—she’d reported it all to Benford for the last five years. But now, seeing it firsthand, she knew the truth. That’s why the Center uses illegals here for the really sensitive cases, she thought. Who could find surveillance in this woodwork?

The Jane Hotel in the West Village was something out of a movie, chosen for her by Gorelikov for its small size and anonymity. An annoyingly voluble bellhop at the front desk had grinned at her (Russians reserve smiling for their friends and family members—to smile with no reason is a sign of a fool) and insisted on telling her that the hotel had been a sailor’s boardinghouse at the turn of the century, and that survivors of the Titanic in 1912 had recuperated here. Dominika thanked him, then ignored him. The lobby was high Victorian, a riot of colored mosaic pilasters and leafy palms in tarnished copper kettles. The bar/lounge was Bohemian crazy, filled with a thousand candles, velveteen upholstered couches, zebra-print armchairs, a brown-leather hippo, and a toffee-colored stuffed bighorn sheep with a cowbell around its neck, standing high atop the fireplace lintel. It would be fun to seduce Nate in this hideaway.

Walking down the dim wainscoted corridor to her room she felt the shipwrecked spirits of 1912 around her. As she fumbled with her key card, an old woman in a woolen suit and matching pillbox hat came out of a room at the end of the corridor. Under the ridiculous hat her white hair was up in a bun, and she wore half-moon glasses. She shuffled soundlessly toward Dominika on the threadbare carpet, her right hand running along the wooden wall panels for balance. Dominika flattened against the wall to make space for the biddy to pass. Behind the glasses, the old woman’s eyes locked onto Dominika’s for a second; they were the color of amber. Hunter’s eyes, wolf’s eyes, raptor’s eyes. A strong blue aura around her head. Cunning, calculation, deception. What was the starukha, the old crone, looking at? She didn’t belong in this trendy hotel either. Dominika suddenly knew: They were watching her. This old woman was a bird dog to report that Dominika had arrived. The MAGNIT case was running on many different levels. The old lady slowly disappeared around a corner.

Dominika’s room was train-compartment narrow, with a ship’s berth instead of a bed. She imagined making love with Nate in this little room, her foot braced on the far wall for purchase. She left her suitcase and purse on the bed, stuffed the EKHO phones, a small snap wallet with money, and her own mobile phone into a shoulder bag, which she zipped shut. She must not lose the phones to be delivered to SUSAN. The old lady in the hallway was a wake-up call: Dominika had no doubt that They would use her personal phone to track her movements as well as hot-wire it to listen to her conversations. Into the other coat pocket she clipped the fat ballpoint pen with pointed metal tip—a tactical fighting spike—that was her only weapon.

She hit the street, wanting to get away before Blokhin appeared, determined to clear her six so she could call Bratok. Never mind the FBI, now she had to worry about Gorelikov’s tricks, her own countrymen following her. Did Gorelikov’s vliyaniye, his influence, extend to the streets of New York? Who would they be, the people checking up on her? Well, she had survived this long spying for Nate and the others, and wasn’t about to be played. As she left the hotel and walked east, she put on the big fashion sunglasses that were designed by the boys in Line T, with beveled mirrors ground into the outer edges of each lens, which permitted a limited view behind her. You didn’t rely on such toys—detecting coverage on the street was much more complicated—but it did not hurt to have them.

Dominika walked for three hours, searching for and finding relatively quiet side streets, stripping away repeats, possibles, ghosts, and suspects. If her cell phone was beaconed and her route plotted later, she would be guilty only of executing a thorough and professional surveillance detection run. She used Union Square as a surveillance trap, knowing that any team scurries to cover exits along all sides of a park and inadvertently show themselves. She scanned the outer edges of the park. Nothing. She plowed up endless, bustling Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building coming closer with each block—beckoning, bigger, taller, and somehow more substantial than the Vystoki, Stalin’s gothic Seven Sisters skyscrapers in Moscow. Nothing showed behind her. Occasional switches to the other side of the street revealed no telltale behavior of handing off the eye. She reversed her direction by taking a taxi south, past the Washington Square Arch, bailing out and walking through the urban campus of New York University to detect pedestrians who stood out among younger casual students. Nothing. Dominika popped into The Smile restaurant on Bond Street—she liked the look of the weathered boards on the ceiling and the rich brick walls—and asked to use the phone behind the bar, explaining in an exaggerated French accent to the skeptical barmaid in a dirty apron that she was from France, and that her mobile phone did not receive service in New York. Besides, I’m calling my CIA handler to discuss foiling a Kremlin attack on the political and security foundations of America, with the express goal of preserving your gravy-stained way of life.

She left her phone in her coat pocket, and hung the coat on a wall hook away from the bar. Bratok answered on the first ring. She told him about her cell phone and the old lady at the hotel, his low chuckle reassuring and comforting. He kept his comments short and cryptic, they’d reviewed meeting procedures a hundred times. “Five o’clock, go to the museum and wait outside. Got it? I’ll be looking out for you.” The line went dead. Gable had just told Dominika to rendezvous with him at the Monkey Bar, at three o’clock. The power-lunch restaurant was renowned for the iconic celebrity murals on its walls (hence “the museum”). Gable had also cryptically told her she’d be countersurveilled as she walked to the restaurant on East Fifty-Fourth Street. She wondered whether it would be the old team again, whether she’d see Nate’s slim features across the street, whether she’d hear his voice, and whether he’d sit beside her close enough to touch him, feel the heat of his body, smell him . . . Stop it.

Gable was chewing an unlit cigar and driving a wheezing, beat-up sedan with torn plastic seats and an Orthodox cross hanging by a plastic chain from the rearview mirror.

The officers from Benford’s CID countersurveilling Dominika gave Gable the all clear, and he had pulled up, thrown open the passenger door, and scooped her off the sidewalk in front of the Monkey Bar. Once rolling, he put fingers to his lips, nodding at the cell phone in her hand. He made two violent right turns, narrowly missed a pedestrian, and careered through crosstown traffic at high speed, shooting the gaps between taxis, trucks, and buses. After one near collision, Dominika reached up, grabbed the swinging cross, and theatrically kissed it. Gable winked at her, delighted. He ran a red light and cut left across oncoming traffic to turn onto Ninth Avenue in the direction of Dominika’s hotel. In classic alteration of surveillance detection run (SDR) pace, Gable now drove south slowly in the right lane, letting honking, gesticulating New York drivers pass him. They were black, no tails. After ten blocks, he swerved to the curb in front of a dingy storefront restaurant with “Turkish Cuisine” written in a faux mosaic over the door. He gestured for Dominika to leave her phone under the seat, and follow him into the restaurant.

The place was dark and cozy, with copper trays and ceramic nazarlik, blue evil-eye talismans, mounted on the walls. Gable ordered a çoban salad, two kebabs, and kiymali ispanak, sautéed ground beef, spinach, and rice. “You’ll love it,” said Bratok. “Nash and I used to eat it at a Turkish joint in Helsinki.”

“Helsinki,” said Dominika, staring. “Skol’ko let, skol’ko zim, so many summers, so many winters; it seems like a million years ago.” Gable looked at her while chewing a piece of bread.

“Yeah, we’ve all come a long way, you most of all,” said Gable. “Now tell me what’s going on.” Dominika sat back and talked fast. She told him about Gorelikov’s instructions and the meeting with SUSAN. She showed him the EKHO phones—they would not be hot-wired if they were meant for an illegal—thinking he’d want techs to take them apart to inspect, but Gable shook his head. “They could be trapped to reveal tampering, and you’re the only one who holds them.” Dominika described the meeting site on Staten Island.

“You know how to take the ferry?”

“I studied the entire route. I know how to get there,” said Dominika.

“This illegal, what’s she look like?” said Gable.

Dominika shrugged. “It was a little black-and-white photo,” said Dominika. “Blond, reading glasses, steely blue eyes. Short hair.”

Gable rubbed his face. “Christ,” he said. “A top illegal in the city and we can’t ID her. How many more of them out there, I wonder.”

“There is no way of knowing,” said Dominika. “Line S, the external illegals department, and Line N, the officers who handle them in-country, are compartmented from the rest of the Service, even from me in KR.” The food came to the table and Gable spooned a mound of glistening spinach onto Dominika’s plate. She tried a forkful. It was a savory combination of sautéed spinach and curried ground beef with a hint of rice. Delicious. And Nate used to eat it. The question popped out before she could stop herself.

“Bratok, where is Nate? What is he doing?” said Dominika.

Gable put down his fork. “Benford sent him to take care of another op. In Asia. Right now, that boy is busier than a cat covering crap on a marble floor. He’ll be back in a couple of weeks. You steamed at him again?” Gable just asked questions, no matter how sensitive.

Dominika smiled. “In Russia we say nalomat drov, to mangle the firewood. You say to mess something up. That’s our love affair. Messed up.”

Gable patted her hand. “I’m not supposed to say this to you,” said Gable, “but you should either cut it off with him once and for all, or defect and concentrate on your lives together. Maybe recruit your replacement before you go. Loving each other and spying at the same time is gonna get someone hurt.” Dominika was silent; she knew Gable understood her. “Don’t tell anyone I told you that,” he said, smiling. Then he got back to business.

“You gotta fly straight with that Spetsnaz guy hanging around. Let him see you nice and relaxed.” Dominika nodded. “Make the meeting with that gal on Staten Island alone, but otherwise keep him close. He’s going to file a trip report and you want them all to think you were never out of pocket. We’ll meet once more after your meet with the illegal. And try to get some ID on her without being too obvious.” Gable waved to a young man at a table across the room and Lucius Westfall walked over.

“This droopy bit of wet wool is Westfall,” said Gable. “He’s backup if you see him on the street, here to help you and me if we need it.” Dominika smiled and shook his hand, noting a blue halo quivering with nervousness. She felt sorry for him, especially since she knew what a bear Gable could be.

“Glad to meet you, Westfall,” said Dominika. He nodded wordlessly, obviously overcome at meeting the famous DIVA. He’d had no idea she was so beautiful. He turned and left the restaurant after an awkward final bow.

“Bratok, you do not torment him too much, do you? He’s so young, like you were once.” Gable grunted.

“I was born old. But tell me more about the Spetsnaz sergeant.”

“This man Blokhin is worse than either Zyuganov or Matorin. He is intelligent, but behind his eyes are, how do you say, hot rocks like when you grill shashlik.”

“Like hot coals? Well, don’t arm wrestle him,” said Gable.

“I am forcing myself to go with him to an event at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue in two days. A Russian journalist, Daria Repina, is speaking at a Free Russia fund-raising event. She is a loud critic of everything Putin does. She is without fear, but now that she is in America raising money it will become dangerous for her.”

“Is it smart for you to be going to something like that? Why would a Spetsnaz snake eater want to go to hear some dissident?” said Gable.

“Attending with him will be a good appearance—I mean bona fides—for me,” said Dominika. “It is a public event. I will stay in the background and leave early. As for Blokhin, I think he is curious. Like a dog sniffing a lamppost. It will be his last night in New York. We both return separately to Moscow the next day.”

“And when you get back, you find out the name of MAGNIT, fast as you can, right?”

“Someone will make a slip. I will hear the name eventually,” said Dominika.

“That’s all well and good, but we gotta wrap MAGNIT up before then, preferably before you’re briefed on the case, before you’re officially told his name. How’s it gonna look if he gets arrested the very weekend you’re read in? Plus that prick is selling secrets wholesale. So let’s blow him up ASAP.”

“There is a problem.” Dominika told Gable about the malfunction with her SRAC transmitter after she had brained the street mugger. Gable shook his head.

“We wondered why you hadn’t sent anything for a week. I told them you had a boyfriend and wouldn’t get out of bed.”

“Nekulturny,” she said. Crude and rude.

“Dammit. Bad time to lose your commo,” said Gable. “I’ll cable the station to get you another set. You want them to cache it or do a personal meet?”

“If you have a good station officer who won’t bring surveillance with him, a personal meet is faster than me digging up a package in the forest. There are five new brief-encounter sites left in the inventory that are still good.”

“You sure? I’d rather break one nail using a shovel than have ten nails pulled out in a prison basement,” said Gable. One normally did not remind agents about being captured and tortured, but Gable and Dominika dealt with each other on a different plane.

“Bratok, that is because you are delicate and sensitive,” said Dominika.

“You fucking got that right,” said Gable, as he signaled for the bill.