The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel by Jason Matthews (9)

To Shoe a Flea

Dominika sat on the upper deck of the crowded, lumbering Staten Island Ferry, drolly appraising the collection of people lining the rail—they looked primarily like tourists—talking about, pointing at, and photographing the receding skyline of Manhattan. They would then rush to the starboard rail to snap the Statue of Liberty, then stampede back to gawk at a vintage gaff-rigged schooner tacking up the bay. They honked like a flock of geese. They were dressed in shorts, T-shirts, and brassiere tops, and wore boots, sneakers, shoes, and sandals, a bizarre tribe that rasped at Dominika’s Russian sensibilities. She was dressed in a light cotton summer-print dress, with fashionable flats, and carried a beige over-the-shoulder bag. She wore her Line T sunglasses. Despite the raucous passengers, she thought these ferries were a marvel, big orange birthday cakes that never stopped crisscrossing the bay, nothing like the belching, shark-nosed hydrofoils that skimmed across Lake Ladoga from Saint Petersburg.

She literally had been swept down the ferry boarding ramp by the crush of laughing, excited sightseers, past placid bomb-sniffing dogs, and was able to find a quiet seat along the outside rail where she enjoyed the salt breeze and thought about today’s meeting with the illegal, SUSAN. She had returned to her hotel room last night and felt the rubber band around her doorknob, a signal confirming a meeting at the site on Staten Island tomorrow afternoon. Dominika wondered if the old lady down the hall had snapped the band in place. She had reviewed the memorized drill, the surveillance detection route she would take: ferryboat, Staten Island train, walking route up to and through the sprawling Moravian Cemetery on Todt Hill, and final approach to the site (which was inside the ornate mausoleum of Gilded Age billionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt, constructed in 1886, and secluded in a private, wooded corner of the park). She had studied the satellite images and memorized the way along the lanes that wound through the forty-five hectares of the graveyard, and knew she could find her way to the site at the appointed time, without coverage. God knew who she had to worry about more on the street during this insane operation—Russians, the illegal, or the FBI.

Gable had been right: Moscow had moved fast. This call-out for the meeting with the illegal came less than forty-eight hours after Dominika had arrived in New York. Dominika could imagine the hurried consultation between Gorelikov and Putin in the Kremlin, their quiet voices briefly discussing options and then the stoic, blue-eyed nod validating whatever tactics Gorelikov suggested to enable the contact. Dominika immediately had gone back out and called Gable from a public phone at a nearby bar, to tell him that “lunch was on tomorrow.” Gable told her to stay cool, that everything she did or said would get back to the men who would be evaluating her. They agreed to meet after Dominika returned to Manhattan.

A swarthy young man leaning against the ferry rail in front of Dominika was obviously a local from Staten Island, dressed in a sports jersey, his dark hair slicked back. He noticed Dominika and came to sit beside her on the plastic molded seat. He flirted, charming and irreverent, his face close, pointing out landmarks as the ferry plowed across New York Harbor, including the arching Verrazano-Narrows Bridge—he called it the Guinea Gangplank although it was unclear to Dominika why—connecting the two boroughs of Brooklyn and Staten Island. Dominika could understand about half of what he said, but smiled and looked where he pointed. When she told him she was from France, he winked at her and knowingly said “Nice wines.”

The thrumming of the ferryboat engines moderated, then the deck shook as the engines were put full astern to ease the nose of the ferry into the exit ramp at St. George Terminal on Staten Island. Time to go, time to turn on, time to go to work. Dominika slung her bag over her shoulder, and nodded vaguely to the young man. Moving quickly, she followed the signs to the adjacent rail platform to board the southbound train. Quick checks to either side did not pick up the loitering passenger, or the too-long look from the young woman on the sidewalk, or the ticket clerk diving for the phone. No coverage, she thought, as she stepped into a train car. As the doors closed, Dominika saw with annoyance that the young man had boarded the next car, and was staring at her through the window of the connecting door. She didn’t have time for this: a Romeo following her, thinking he might get lucky with a hot tourist from France.

The train rattled and swayed and stopped frequently at suburban stations. A different world was unraveling in front of Dominika’s eyes on each side of the tracks. Commercial areas had petrol stations on every corner; there were supermarkets with tomatoes stacked on display in front, and she counted restaurant after restaurant—most of them claiming they made the best pizza in New York. Was this even New York City? The train clanked past working-class neighborhoods of tidy two-story houses, shingled, with lean-to greenhouses and tiny fenced yards, some of which had curious aboveground swimming pools hardly big enough to hold a person. On every roof was a gray satellite TV dish, all pointed up in the same direction. The houses were nothing like the luxurious dachas of the siloviki; these were not rich people, but these houses looked comfortable. The cars parked along the street were big and relatively new. If this was not wealth, it was at least prosperity on a wide scale. In Russia, they would say blagopoluchiye, bread buttered on both sides, well-being. Not many people, not even in Moscow, were living lives with such possessions, with such abundant food. Her countrymen struggled to survive, they despaired of improving their lives, they dared not think grand thoughts or speak the truth. They could not choose.

Dominika had memorized the strange names of the train stations: Grasmere, Old Town, Dongan Hills, Jefferson Avenue, Grant City. People bustled on and off as the train doors opened and closed—no observable surveillance behavior, nothing amiss. She could see the young man in the next car watching her through the glass. The next station was her waypoint, New Dorp, where she had to get off. She stepped out to the platform and quickly walked in the middle of a crowd of passengers up the steep exit staircase to street level and onto a broad boulevard with light traffic. On the opposite corner stood an Italian bakery owned by someone named Dominick. Perhaps I will have a bakery someday named Dominika’s, she thought. Idiot you don’t know how to bake. She went inside, assaulted by the heavy aroma of fresh bread, noting there were no lines at the counter, was no one screaming for service, no churlish salesperson cursing at customers. She bought something called a calzone, which looked like an oversized chebureki, a Russian meat pie. This calzone was baked golden brown with a fluted edge, and was served with a small cup of tomato sauce.

Dominika sat at one of a few tables by the window and checked the street. The persistent Romeo was loitering on the opposite sidewalk, smoking. An American gopnik, but he didn’t look as tough as the Moscow species. Bozhe, God, she didn’t need this distraction right now. The mixture of sausage, peppers, and onions inside the calzone was delectable and oozed out, and she wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. Izobiliye, she thought, abundance. This was an American neighborhood bakery, not a state store, one of hundreds in this borough alone. Enough. Get moving.

Dominika walked up New Dorp Lane, the sidewalks broad and clean, people in storefront offices working. A corner food market, the “Convenient Mart,” whatever that meant, had cases of bottled water stacked high on either side of the door. The young man was still following her and she knew she had to shake him before she neared the cemetery. The illegal might be observing her approach and it would be a disaster if she couldn’t get rid of him. As she was entering the store in an effort to shake him off, Dominika heard footsteps and the young man called “Hey, Mam’sell!” and she turned to see Romeo take a picture of her with his cell phone at a distance of five feet, then hold it up to admire. Besides her official academy photo, and the ID pics Gable had taken of her in Helsinki, and ops alias passport photos, there was no extant photograph of SVR Colonel Dominika Egorova, especially not on the mobile phone of some durak, some idiot, in front of the Convenient Mart, on New Dorp Lane, on Staten Island, forty minutes before a clandestine contact with an illegals officer. She’d be on this boy’s Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts in three minutes.

Dominika made an instant calculation. “Since you seem so intent on following me,” said Dominika to him, “perhaps you can show me a good bottle of American wine in this store.”

The young man stepped up to her, exuding his snail-trail charm. “Show you a bottle of wine, or share it with you?” he cooed.

Dominika let a slight smile move her lips. “It depends how good the wine is,” she said.

The young man led her into the little market, down a food aisle where Dominika stopped in amazement to count no fewer than ten different types of breakfast cereals on the shelf, an impossible riot of color. She followed Romeo to the back of the store, and stood in front of a wine cooler with sliding glass doors, while Romeo pointed out the reds, then the whites. They had everything, anything she wanted. Almaden, Gallo, Carlo Rossi, Blue Nun, Lancers. He said the Franzia box wines were underrated. If she didn’t like any of the wines, they had pints behind the counter: gin, vodka, rye. Dominika chose a white and let Romeo pay, then followed him across the avenue to sit on a step that was part of a cement bridge that carried ribbed steam-heat pipes over the commuter train tracks and was screened from the main road. The cement bridge shook when a train passed beneath. Blokhin would have driven the tactical spike through Romeo’s eye and into his brain, but Dominika took a sip from the bottle—the wine was sweet and metallic—then handed it back. She turned and hit him on the side of his neck with a hammer fist that started down by her left hip and snapped around with torque provided by her hips. The strike overloaded the nerves in his mastoid process, and his head slumped forward as he pitched unconscious face-first onto the concrete. If he wasn’t dead, he would be out for several hours, and Dominika would be long rid of Staten Island. She fished Romeo’s phone out of his back pocket and used a broken, pointed chunk of concrete as a Paleolithic tool to pulverize the modern appliance into plastic crumbles, none remotely recognizable as a phone. She scattered the smithereens onto the tracks under the bridge, took a final vile sip from the bottle, and threw that too, to smash on the rail bed among all the detritus piled along the tracks.

“Zvezdá, big shot,” said Dominika, looking down at Romeo, knowing it would have been easier and more secure to have killed him. She wondered if she would eventually get to that point: the Blokhin/Stalin default solution—kill and erase the obstacle, regardless of circumstances.

Moving quickly, Dominika turned right onto Richmond Road and walked uphill past houses with painted fences and trimmed bushes. Many of the houses had American flags hanging from the porches. The street was quiet, she was black, and there was no trailing coverage, she was sure. She was a Russian intelligence officer loose in America, proceeding to a meeting with a sleeper agent.

The temperature was mild, the sky was clear, the sunlight was bright. The ornamental gate to the Moravian Cemetery was open, flanked by lush orange trumpet vines. As if she had visited this graveyard every weekend, Dominika unerringly took the left-hand path, walked past the placid lake, its surface stirred by the drooping branchlets of willows. She continued along the paved drive flanked on either side by acres of tombstones. Some of the stone markers were extravagant: twenty-foot obelisks or ziggurats topped by ecstatic angels. She passed rows of small ornate mausoleums protruding out of grassy tumuli, family names carved on the lintels. These were nothing like the outlandish headstones of assassinated gangsters, or murdered journalists, or martyred dissidents in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, with startlingly realistic images of the departed carved into the marble. Where would President Putin be laid to rest in Moscow? she wondered. Would the monsters resting in the Kremlin wall scoot over to make room for him? Or would he prefer a twenty-story porphyry obelisk on the Moscow Hills so he could gaze down on the Rodina he so energetically defended?

At Dominika’s thought of Putin, the warming sun went behind a cloud and she felt a cold shiver. The cemetery was utterly still now, no birds, no traffic noise, as if the spirits knew what was happening. The grass around the gravestones stirred; she heard whispers around her, or was that the breeze? But there was no breeze. Get a hold of yourself, she thought as she walked, keep your head, meet this bitch, and let’s complicate Vladimir Putin’s life. Dominika kept left, and followed the footpath into a dark forested section with very little sunlight. It smelled cold here, and she pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head. Her hand drifted into her purse and around the shaft of the tactical steel pen in the side pocket. She looked left and right into the trees, her Russian imagination conjuring up wolves weaving through the coppice, keeping pace with her.

She rounded a bend in the path and saw the massive wrought-iron lych-gate, the entrance to the private cemetery grounds of the Vanderbilt family. The gate was secured with a heavy-duty chain, but Dominika followed the boundary wall ten meters to the right, and was able to hitch up her dress and boost herself over. The path curved left, and the woods opened up to a grassy clearing ringed by a low-curved curb. The white-stone mausoleum at one end dominated the space. It resembled the front of a Romanesque church, with three arched doors, a tall central gable, and two conical cupolas on the roof. The crypt itself extended from the ornate façade into the earthen hill behind.

It was deathly quiet, the sun behind the clouds. Dominika stood still and watched the woods, listened to the air around her. There would have been no way for Gable to set up on this spot without spooking SUSAN. The veteran illegal knew what she was doing picking this site. Dominika checked her watch; it was time. She walked up the five curving steps to the entrance, and pushed on the central steel door with matching ornate handles. Dominika knew the crypt doors normally would be locked and probably chained, but mechanical locks posed no problems, ever. The door swung in easily, soundlessly, and a fetid breath of cold stone hit her, a coffin smell, a whiff of endless time. The dim vaulted room was flanked by wall crypts with stone coffins, and a massive tomb with a curved top and adorned with intricate carved decorations—presumably the sarcophagus of the paterfamilias—dominated the center of the chamber.

“Dobriy den tovarishch, good afternoon, comrade,” said a silky voice in Russian. Dominika willed herself not to jump. Gripping the fighting spike in her purse, she turned slowly toward the voice and saw a dark silhouette in the corner of the crypt, completely in shadow. No halo was visible in this darkness. The only illumination came from the milky bar of light through the cracked central door, keeping most of the room in darkness. “You are precisely on time, but that is to be expected from the famous Colonel Egorova.” Moscow accent, educated, but originally from the south, with a trace of yakanye, the broad vowels of the lower Volga, thought Dominika.

“Good afternoon. I am glad we could meet,” said Dominika, holding out her hand. Will you come closer to shake? The woman didn’t move, and Dominika lowered her hand.

“How much time do you have? I presume we both have to return to Manhattan tonight,” said Dominika. She had a mild goal of getting the woman to talk a little, to see what she could learn. But carefully. “This Staten Island is a strange place.” The silhouette shrugged.

“It is remote, quiet, and parochial. I find it well suited for operations,” she said. Okay, you operate here. Interesting.

“I would find all of New York operationally challenging,” said Dominika.

“One becomes accustomed to the rhythms of the city,” said the woman, vaguely. She isn’t going to volunteer anything. She’s too smart.

“I imagine you do,” said Dominika, now talking a little shop between professionals. “But in my assignments I have had to contend with active, hostile opposition on the street. As a civilian you, of course, have greater latitude to operate than does a diplomat officer in the rezidentura.” The silhouette shifted slightly.

“I suppose so. The magazine industry has provided effective cover over the years,” said SUSAN. “It fortuitously is dominated by savvy and aggressive women—our timorous male counterparts are less dynamic. Still, there are disadvantages: dealing with writers can be a trial, you have no idea.” This is going nowhere. Back to business.

“I have the devices—one each for you and MAGNIT—which will provide secure voice communications. If you need to meet personally, you are to coordinate with Line S. I imagine there are ample discreet sites, equidistant from New York and Washington,” said Dominika. She slid the zippered pouch with the EKHO phones across the dusty curved lid of Commodore Vanderbilt’s sarcophagus, half expecting to hear him complain from inside about being disturbed in his sleep, by Russians no less.

“MAGNIT has less latitude for travel than I,” said SUSAN. “And Washington is an easier counterintelligence environment, even within the city.” Okay, you meet in Washington, in the city. Benford will be glad to learn that.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” asked Dominika. “Is there anything you or the asset requires?” A long shot—what couldn’t MAGNIT obtain in the United States that SVR could? Gold bullion? Blood diamonds? Polonium? No more questions. Maybe walk out into the sunlight with her? A glimpse of her halo?

“Spasibo, there is nothing I require,” said SUSAN, condescension edging into her voice. Then Dominika saw the smear of dust on the sarcophagus lid where she had slid the zippered pouch, and her thoughts raced.

“Then I have a requirement for you,” said Dominika sternly, holding her breath, hoping this would work. “I was given a third encrypted mobile phone for contingency use, including for contacting you. I would not like to carry it back to Moscow through airport security. I will pass it to you to dispose of securely the night before I return home. I, of course, could myself throw it into the river, but that kind of haphazard destruction has proven to be disastrous in past cases—equipment has been recovered by the opposition. You must melt the chip, break apart the handset, and disperse the pieces widely so they will not be associated with each other. Passing the phone to you would not require another personal meeting—I will emplace it at a timed drop of your choosing.”

“There are a million places in the city where you can dispose of a phone,” said SUSAN, pettishly. She’d been on her own for twenty years, met by servile Line N handlers who never questioned her. Dominika put some menace into her voice, the vocal grit all Russians recognize as looming trouble.

“Your long record of service in America—how many years has it been?—undoubtedly has given you encyclopedic knowledge of the city, which is precisely why I am enlisting your assistance. Given that your own contact numbers are on the instrument, it moreover is an operational requirement that we do this,” said Dominika, flatly. The shadow of the woman stirred, clearly nettled at being told what to do. But all illegals, especially the longtime ones, feared one thing even more than exposure and capture: recall to Moscow, the end of this cushy existence, the end of comfort and abundance, to be cast down again into the pit of Russian sloth, and bureaucracy, and depravation, with a headquarters desk, a dingy apartment, and perhaps a subcompact car, with a medal to wear at ceremonies, the end of foreign assignments, and even of personal foreign travel. Forever. And this blue-eyed chief of CI just made reference to SUSAN’s many years in America, and could conceivably make trouble over a stupid regulation. She sullenly gave Dominika the address of a dead drop in Manhattan along with a description. Okay, a way to identify our silky-voiced friend.

But now Dominika had to get to Gable to tell him her plan, before her last two days were spent in the protective shadow of Sergeant Blokhin. No more pushing Little Miss SUSAN. She mustn’t become suspicious. Conversation tailed off. The meeting was over.

Consistent with established tradecraft procedures, Dominika left the mausoleum first and returned to Manhattan. She never saw the other woman again. Russians don’t say that someone is a top pro, they say podkovat blochu, that someone can shoe a flea. This woman was like that: even after a fifteen-minute meeting with the illegal, standing three feet away, Dominika couldn’t have picked SUSAN out of a crowd if her life depended on it. And she knew eventually it probably would.