by Max Karpov
Praise for The Plot to Kill Putin
“Max Karpov has produced a cleverly conceived thriller that tracks reality. He captures perfectly the mentality of Vladimir Putin’s Russia—its deep sense of insecurity that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the malign behavior that flows from it. And, on top of it, the book is near impossible to put down. A must read.”
—Michael Morell, Former Acting Director and Deputy Director, CIA
“The Plot to Kill Putin is a well-written, thought-provoking thriller that is extremely timely in light of the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 Presidential election.”
—Phillip Margolin, New York Times bestselling author of The Third Victim
“The Plot to Kill Putin is uncanny in its timeliness and brilliant in its portrayal of disinformation as the most dangerous weapon of the new Cold War. Max Karpov has written a masterful thriller that is genuinely alarming in its plausibility. A must-read for 2018.”
—Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of Paranoia and The Switch
“Max Karpov’s The Plot to Kill Putin is just about the timeliest novel I’ve read this year. But this is no mere ripped-from-the-headlines knockoff. This is a fast-paced, vivid, surprising thriller, featuring a great new hero for our troubled times, former CIA agent Christopher Niles. Don’t miss this one. I can’t wait to read more.”
—David Bell, author of Bring Her Home
“The Plot to Kill Putin is a cerebral, ground-breaking, all-too-plausible thriller made all the more prescient by the current state of U.S.-Russian relations. Max Karpov peers into his crystal ball in crafting a tale that’s so cutting edge, flipping the pages may result in bloodied fingertips. Karpov proves himself every bit the equal of Daniel Silva in crafting the best book of its kind since Nelson DeMille’s classic The Charm School. Searingly sumptuous storytelling sure to please fans of Brad Thor, Brad Taylor and the late, great Vince Flynn.”
—Jon Land,USA Today bestselling author of Strong to the Bone
“Compelling, authoritative, and extraordinarily timely, The Plot to Kill Putin is a cleverly plotted and disturbingly plausible journey into the dangerous realm of cyberwarfare. Max Karpov is a Kremlin-watcher whose extensive knowledge shines on every page. He’s a fresh voice in the genre, and his insightful novel takes the underworld of espionage in unexpected and startling new directions.”
—Carla Norton, New York Times bestselling author of Perfect Victim
“A tense tale of international intrigue, The Plot to Kill Putin is absorbing, thrilling, and frighteningly relevant.”
—Laura McHugh, author of the International Thriller Writers Award–winning The Weight of Blood
“Gripping and powerful . . . a brilliant story written for our generation. The Plot to Kill Putin is a must read for any serious spy fan.”
—Michael Brady, author of the Into The Shadows spy series
“A razor-sharp, bow-string-taut, brilliantly plotted example of the thriller-writer’s art. For me the prose is up there with le Carre and Forsyth.”
—E.M. Davey, former BBC investigative journalist, author of Foretold by Thunder and The Napoleon Complex
“Timely, plausible, and captivating, The Plot to Kill Putin is as prophetic as it is thrilling.”
—Alan Jacobson, USA Today bestselling author of Dark Side of the Moon
“A tight, gripping tale of the men and women who face death in the hidden conflicts of superpower politics. Startlingly believable.”
—Ben Bova, six-time Hugo Award–winning author of Mars and the Grand Tour series
“If you believe the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, think again! Max Karpov’s explosive novel shows how Russia’s sophisticated troll factories and bot armies could topple Western democracies as effectively as their T72 battle tanks and nuclear warheads. Karpov’s knowledge of the American intelligence community and Russian politics puts him on a par with John le Carré and Frederick Forsyth at their very best. But it is Karpov’s analysis of the shocking power of a targeted post-truth and fake news attack that gives the book a contemporary and chilling atmosphere. A new master thriller writer has emerged, and I am looking forward to reading many more of Max Karpov’s novels.”
—Christopher Hepworth, author of The Sleepwalker Legacy and The Last Oracle
“Espionage, thrills, chills and, perhaps, a little too close to home, this is one book that you should not miss. Writer Max Karpov’s ultimate talent stems from being able to explain all the intricacies of cyberwarfare while making sure to always keep the pace fast and the action nonstop.”
—Suspense Magazine
“A well-written, fast-paced, and timely thriller . . . What is especially relevant and chillingly plausible is the whole concept of using a cyberattack to spread misinformation and fake news. Hello . . . ”
—She Treads Softly
“The book may be a wake-up call, but first and foremost it is a brilliant plot showcasing a major literary talent.”
—stacyalesi.com
“I was hooked from the moment I started reading.”
—Reading on a Budget
For Janet and Mandy
Copyright © 2018 by Max Karpov
New paperback edition 2020
Previously published in hardcover as The Children’s Game
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Cover photo: iStockphoto
Print ISBN: 978-1-950691-15-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3482-1
Printed in the United States of America
“The person who yells ‘Thief!’ the loudest is the thief himself.”
—Old Russian saying
Contents
Prologue
Part I: The Catalyst
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Part II: The Fourth
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Fifty-Eight
Fifty-Nine
Sixty
Sixty-One
Sixty-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
After the long winter, it was spring again in Moscow. The last crusts of sooty snow had melted from the curbs and the city parks were bright with the colors of tulips and lilacs. At the Kremlin gardens, the apple and cherry trees were in bloom, filling the air with a familiar scent of anticipation.
On nearby Boulevard Ring Road, an unmarked white cargo van was moving through afternoon traffic, away from the great onion domes of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, where ten days earlier President Putin and five thousand worshippers had gathered for Easter Mass.
The van’s passenger, Ivan Delkoff, could hear the swish of the wet roadway and the bleats of car horns as the van moved through central Moscow traffic. But he could not see where they were going; he could only imagine. A large man with an aversion to enclosed spaces, Delkoff was seated in the windowless rear cabin of the van, facing backward, dressed in the sun-faded fatigues and combat boots he wore every day, as a familiar-sounding Russian music played faintly through the speakers. The only personal possession he carried besides his ID was a small photograph of his son, staring at the camera with his dark, innocent eyes, dressed in the military uniform he’d been wearing on the afternoon he was killed.
The drive alternated between the stop-and-go of city traffic and the full-on of the freeway, so that eventually Ivan Delkoff stopped guessing where they were and thought instead of the odd chain of events that had brought him here. And of the meeting he would soon be having with a man once known as Russia’s “dark angel.”
Delkoff was in his late forties now, a colonel in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, although he still thought of himself as a foot soldier in his country’s larger war. He woke most days knowing that he had a role to play in Russian history, without knowing exactly what it was. Delkoff’s stark appearance—the long, serious face and wide mouth that flattened like a piece of string—often caused people to underestimate him, to miss the tenacity and intelligence that had made him an accomplished military leader. In the Donbas, Delkoff’s special forces units had routed the Ukrainian army and various ad hoc battalions, setting the de facto borders for a new “people’s republic.” For a time, some of the Russian separatists there had taken to calling Delkoff the region’s “defense minister,” a distinction he privately enjoyed. There were others who called him “the crazy colonel,” which he didn’t enjoy so much.
Like many in Russia’s military intelligence branch, Delkoff had married young and divorced young. The death of Pavel, his only son, last summer in the Donbas had only deepened his commitment to the motherland. But it had also made him less tolerant of the Kremlin’s political management of eastern Ukraine. Delkoff understood that the undeclared war in the Donbas had become the front line in a larger conflict, a moral and cultural war for Russia’s future. But eastern Ukraine was also where that war had stalled. And Delkoff, like many Russian patriots, had come to resent the Kremlin because of it, especially its policy of sending men to fight without uniforms, to be buried in unmarked graves. There was a dangerous hubris now in Moscow, troubling signs that the average Russian did not see.
He’d spoken of it briefly over the winter with a Ukrainian journalist, who promised not to quote him. But then he’d done so anyway, a little more accurately than Delkoff would have liked, attributing his comments to “a Russian colonel on the ground in the Donbas.”
Three weeks later, Delkoff had been called back to Moscow, on the pretense of a special assignment from the Kremlin. He was given a small office in the city and a generous weekly salary to do nothing but show up each day and read reports. A “case officer” was assigned: a short, broad-faced man who sat with him in afternoon “debriefings,” asking questions and taking notes. Based on what the officer asked about Ukraine, Delkoff began to suspect that he was being set up for treason. He’d decided to vanish before that happened, to travel to Belarus where a small network of friends and family would take him in.
But then Ivan Delkoff learned that his “assignment” wasn’t from the Kremlin after all. Two days before he planned to disappear, Delkoff found out that it was actually Andrei Turov who had summoned him to Moscow. And knowing that changed everything.
Turov had once been part of the president’s inner circle, the Leningrad coterie that formed Putin’s unofficial private politburo. He’d worked briefly for the FSB, successor organization to the KGB, and then as secretary of security services, early in Putin’s presidency. But for the past fifteen years, Turov had run his own private security business, based in Moscow. His clients included the Kremlin, for whom Turov occasionally did “black ledger” work, benefiting the president but never tied to him directly. In the mid-2000s Putin had supposedly called Turov Russia’s “dark angel.”
But that was then. More recently, there had been stories of a rift between the president and Andrei Turov. Last fall, several of Turov’s branch offices had been seized by the government, and there was talk now that he was under pressure to leave Russia. The stories echoed those of other powerful men who had shown too much ambition or independence in Putin’s Russia. Men such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in the country, who’d spent ten years in a Siberian prison camp after crossing the Russian president. Or Boris Nemtsov, the former first deputy prime minister, a prominent Putin critic who was gunned down in front of the Kremlin in 2015. Or Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB officer who accused Putin of corruption, then died an agonizing public death over twenty-three days from a dose of radioactive polonium.
The idea that Turov had crossed over to the president’s less-than-forgiving side was what made this April summons particularly interesting to Ivan Delkoff. It was the only reason he was in the back of this van today and not in Belarus.
An hour passed, and another ten minutes. Finally the traffic sounds began to fade. Delkoff pictured the neighborhood they were in: breezy lawns, shade trees, new flowers. One of Russia’s new gated developments outside Moscow. Delkoff had heard that Turov liked to do business in rented houses, rather than in Moscow offices or in the mansions favored by the oligarchs. He listened as the cargo van slowed, backed up, and came to a stop; he heard the mechanical whirring of a garage door.
The man who opened the doors of the van looked familiar: small and thickset, with a stubbled face and shaved head. This was Anton Konkin, Turov’s loyal gatekeeper, like himself a former FSB officer. Delkoff followed the smaller man down a hallway to a dark-paneled library, where Konkin gestured him in and closed the door.
The room was unlit, with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, dark-wood tables and chairs, a leather sofa. Like the rest of the house, it felt new, as if no one actually lived here. But then, scanning the furnishings, Delkoff saw that Andrei Turov was in the room, too, seated behind a desk in the corner.
“Zdravstvuyte,” he said, greeting Delkoff with the formal geniality of an innkeeper. He offered a firm handshake and motioned for him to sit on the leather chair in front of the desk. “It’s an honor to see you again. It took us a while to get you here.”
Turov’s eyes stayed with Delkoff as they sat. They’d met once before, seven or eight years ago. Turov conveyed much the impression he had then—an ordinary-looking man, middle-aged, with short-cropped gray hair and firm lips that lent a sensible expression to his face. But there was an otherworldly quality to his pale blue eyes that was a little unsettling, like the eyes
of a wild dog. “We are indebted to you,” Turov said. “You have made important strides in the Donbas. Even though I know that you are not pleased with how the war is going. None of us are.”
Delkoff nodded, being careful. His first instinct was to distrust men he didn’t know. And Turov, despite his unassuming demeanor, had a reputation as a magician, a man who could deceive people in ways they didn’t see or even imagine.
“Russia’s passions were awakened in March of 2014, as you know,” Turov went on, meaning the annexation of Crimea. “But you understand better than anyone the problem we have faced since then.”
Turov’s eyes stayed with him. This issue—“the problem”—had come up several times in his debriefings. Delkoff had taken it as a test of loyalty then; now, he saw it was something else.
“We have an assignment that you are uniquely qualified to carry out,” Turov said, with his even temperament. “That will help us to at last end this war. To win it.”
Delkoff sat up a little straighter. He knew that Turov was talking about the larger war now. The war for a greater Russian society, anchored in tradition, discipline, morality—all those things the West had lost or was losing.
“It’s important that we speak openly here,” Turov said. “I would like to hear what concerns you most about Ukraine.”
“The same things that concern you,” Delkoff said, glancing at the closed file on Turov’s desk, and the printout of notes beside it. Turov had vetted him for weeks, he knew, since long before he’d been summoned to Moscow. His team had talked with Delkoff’s estranged daughter in Belarus, his friends and his ex-wife. “The same things that concern the men fighting there, and their families,” he said. “That we don’t finish what we started. Otherwise, what was it for?”
Turov nodded for him to go on.
“I’m concerned, as many Russians are,” Delkoff said, “that our weakness will leave us vulnerable. That it will open us up to riots and a Western-led fascist revolution—like what the Americans did in Kiev, and in the Middle East. The hypocrites.”
Turov’s eyes brightened for a moment, giving affirmation to his words—“riots” being the preferred term to “protests”; “fascist” preferable to “democratic.”
