The Plot to Kill Putin

by Max Karpov

  But this wasn’t just pride. Zelenko was also nervous, more than he should’ve been. Nervous about something besides the mission. A man talks when he’s no longer at peace with his thoughts. Something he had read once.

  Delkoff flicked away the last of his cigarette onto the barn floor and crushed the embers with his boot before going out. He squinted into the sun, feeling the afternoon heat on his face, smelling the odor of his own body.

  Zelenko stiffened, seeing him, but Delkoff smiled and they all turned to the fields, waiting for a breeze to rustle the sunflower stalks.

  “We ready?” Delkoff asked Pletner.

  Pletner was a tall man with broad, blunt features—but the acquiescent eyes and bright teeth of an innocent, largely indistinguishable from other young men of the same age.

  They set out again in silence, Pletner driving the camouflage Tigr reconnaissance truck along the unpaved farm road, more comfortable behind the wheel than anywhere else, as dust boiled up behind them in the heat. They rode past untended corn and onion farms, two-room wooden cottages, an unexploded missile jutting from a front yard, a combine, a schoolhouse with a Swiss-cheese pattern of artillery holes in one wall. Interrupted lives. Ukraine was the world’s largest producer of sunflower oil, but many of the farms and seed-crushing plants in Donetsk territory had been abandoned this summer. The barn where they’d stopped for lunch now stored Grad rockets and mortar shells.

  Delkoff sat in back, thinking of his family and the war, as he always did, and of those places where the two had intersected. But at the same time he watched Zelenko, giving him a hard smile each time he turned around.

  For Ivan Delkoff, the war was more than a quarter century old now. It had begun the night the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time outside the Kremlin. December 26, 1991. On Friday afternoon, it would move to a new front, in the farmland north of here. The Americans, naturally, didn’t know this. The Americans’ war had ended just as Russia’s was beginning. They’d been so busy high-fiving each other they failed to understand Russia was never going to roll over and become “Westernized.” They’d wanted a simple outcome to the so-called Cold War, something resembling one of their action films— the good guys win, the Russians lose—and arrogantly assumed that American “democracy” could be exported around the world like a fast-food franchise. But Russia was a great and complex country, with traditions that most Americans, with their truncated attention spans, did not understand. When no one bothered to correct them, they assumed they’d won, having no idea how resilient and unusual the Russian spirit could be. The Americans had been asleep all these years—as Andrei Turov had told him in the spring—inviting retaliation.

  Delkoff thought of his father—bureaucrat, soldier, patriot—who had ingrained these nationalist ideas in him, holding court with Delkoff and his brother in the living room of their tiny south Moscow apartment, drinking vodka from a fruit jar and talking of the Soviet victory over Hitler in the Great Patriotic War. A man Delkoff would never resemble, except in that fundamental belief in Russian greatness. Delkoff thought of the battles in his own life that had led him here, beginning with Transnistria in 1992, the two wars in Chechnya, and the failed secret operation in Estonia five years ago. He remembered the battles his son had fought in the Donbas, and his thoughts returned, inevitably, to the one that had killed him on that rainy afternoon near Lugansk last summer—the stupid ambush—and he felt angry all over again.

  It was nearly dusk when they reached the farm property that would serve as the command post for Friday’s operation. Delkoff undid the padlocks on the warehouse doors and they pulled the truck inside, parking it next to the TAR—a target acquisition radar, the tank-like vehicle Delkoff had transported here two weeks ago.

  In the back of the warehouse was Delkoff’s makeshift office. He’d moved in a cot, a desk, and several folding chairs, along with a small refrigerator and steamer trunk. In the trunk was a ten-liter jerry can filled with gasoline, an automatic rifle, a Makarov handgun, a scout combat knife, and a bag containing his change of clothes, money— both euros and Ukrainian hryvnias—as well as three passports and a simple disguise Delkoff had purchased from a Moscow costume shop.

  In six and a half hours, the unmarked trucks from the north would arrive, after passing through Ukrainian-controlled territory, with the missile launcher and the mobile command post. The equipment and transports would be stored here beside the TAR until Friday afternoon, when history would change. When Delkoff’s battalion would at last open a “new front.”

  The three men sat on folding chairs in the farm road that night as the air cooled, stars glistening above the sunflower fields. Delkoff went through the operation details again and talked about battles he’d fought, in Transnistria and Chechnya, while Zelenko and Pletner listened, reserved and attentive.

  But Zelenko was looking at Delkoff a little strangely tonight. Lowering his eyes just a moment too soon several times. And that told Delkoff what he needed to know.

  No, Zelenko wasn’t like his son, after all. It wasn’t even close.

  By the time the other two men retired to the basement of the farmhouse for a few hours of sleep, Delkoff had made up his mind. It was all there in Zelenko’s eyes: the reason he was acting so nervous today wasn’t because of their mission; it was because of what he planned to do afterward.

  Delkoff had dissected Turov’s plans enough by then to know that at some point they would involve a secret assassin. Delkoff knew too much to be allowed to survive, despite the magician’s assurances. And Zelenko, by appearances the most unlikely man for the job—small, timid, sneaky in a transparent way—must have been his choice, for that very reason. Zelenko was Turov’s assassin.

  “Get a few hours of sleep,” he said, patting Zelenko on the shoulder. “I’ll wake you when they arrive.”

  FOUR

  Wednesday evening, August 11. Northern Virginia.

  Walking alone from customs into the main terminal building at Dulles International Airport, Anna Carpenter felt a vague uneasiness, a sense that something was coming, something people weren’t ready for. Maybe it was just the contrast between Martin Lindgren’s urgency and the sleepy city that she was returning to. Washington officially closed for business at the end of July for a five-week summer “recess.” Members of both houses of Congress returned to their home states for the month or went on vacation. No legislation was passed, there were no committee meetings. The Supreme Court was on hiatus. Even the president was in the midst of a two-week holiday. If someone wanted to catch America asleep at the switch, August would be a pretty good time to do it.

  Mixed with these uneasy feelings were more personal concerns, which Anna had been fighting ever since leaving Christopher in Greece. It still bothered her how quickly the Turov assignment had gotten into his bloodstream. Martin had given him a taste again, and she’d seen the transformation. A reminder of how his work could turn Christopher into someone she barely recognized: compulsive, single-minded, emotionally detached. His father had given him that. Chris and his half brother were the products of a brilliant but demanding man who’d set unrealistic standards for his sons. Carroll Niles had been an influential figure in the counterintelligence community for three decades, recipient of a Distinguished Intelligence Medal. People now routinely referred to him as a “gentleman” spy; but he’d also been a taskmaster, a remote figure who rarely praised his sons, who’d waged his own war with the Washington bureaucracy. In the weeks after Anna met Chris, she sometimes felt that he was still fighting his father’s unfinished battles.

  The interruption of their trip stirred other memories, as well, of the sudden breakup of Anna’s marriage six years ago. She still faulted herself at times for that: for being too career-minded and not making enough room for family, for failing to anticipate that her husband couldn’t deal with her becoming a public figure, or that he’d ever be unfaithful.

  Greece had been Anna’s idea. A chance to shut out the noise in their lives for a few da
ys. She never imagined she would be returning to Washington alone, with this sort of apphrension in her head.

  “Mom!” David Carpenter, Anna’s twenty-four-year-old son, reached out and squeezed her arm, breaking her reverie. She’d almost walked right past him. “I was waving for, like, five minutes. Didn’t you see me?”

  “No, I guess I didn’t.” Anna smiled, feeling a rush of affection for her tall, earnest son. He looked sharp in jeans and a crisp blue dress shirt, watching her with his dark, inquisitive eyes. “Sorry, honey.” She rose on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “Guess I’m a little jet-lagged.”

  David took her carry-on and began to walk, staying a step ahead of his mother, deftly dodging the pedestrian traffic as if it were important to be first to baggage claim. Anna’s son was six two and a half—six inches taller than she was, and still something of a “string bean,” as people used to call him (her staff had labeled him “Jonah” once, thinking he resembled the character on Veep). But he carried himself with a professional assurance now, which seemed to have grown in proportion to his career. After floundering for a year or so during the divorce, David had found his calling in computers, without a lot of guidance from his mother—and none from his father, who’d run off to California with his much-younger girlfriend. Success had given her son ambition, rather than the other way around, and he’d risen quickly from an IT tech to a “bug hunter” to a “cybersecurity analyst.” He worked now for one of D.C.’s largest threat-intel firms, monitoring the dark web for terrorist and cybercrime activity, with clients that included defense contractors and the federal government. David’s career had given him an anchor and a sense of purpose he’d never known growing up. And it had made his mother proud.

  As they approached baggage claim, Anna noticed a two-man TSA VIPR team in body armor walking their way carrying semiautomatic rifles. Something was different at Dulles tonight, she could see. She waited until David hoisted her bag from the carousel before placing a call to Ming Hsu, her chief of staff. “I’m back,” Anna said, following her son to the garage.

  “Welcome,” Ming said, in her factual manner.

  “What’s going on at the airport? I’m at Dulles.”

  “Nothing specific. Heightened chatter. I’ll have something for you in the morning.” Anna had known Ming for more than ten years, and understood what she was saying: Go home, get a good night’s sleep. If you’re going to worry, save it for morning. She clicked off and hurried to catch up to David. For the past several weeks, signals intelligence had suggested that Russia was preparing some sort of military move in the Baltics. At the same time, there’d been increased chatter among known Russian agents within the States. As a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Anna had been briefed on both issues before leaving for vacation. But tonight was the first she’d heard anything about US airports.

  David, she saw, had stopped in the parking garage, setting her bags down behind a smart car. “This is your car?” she said. “When did you get this?”

  “It’s Malika’s.” He pointed a key fob and the hatch popped open. “Don’t worry, it’s safe.”

  Anna’s concern was less about safety than about how David, she, and the luggage were all going to fit. But her bags went right in. He shut the hatch as if he’d done this many times. Malika was David’s first serious girlfriend, a woman about half his size and far more outgoing, but for mysterious reasons, they were a good match. He’d met her at work last year, and they’d recently moved into a house together out in the Maryland suburbs.

  “Careful,” Anna said as he lurched into the aisle lane. It was the first time she’d been in a smart car and it didn’t feel safe at all. It felt as if two-thirds of the car were missing.

  “We get a lot of clown car jokes,” David said. An SUV going much too fast swerved around them, horn blaring, as he pulled into the traffic lane. “Jerk,” he muttered, glancing in his side mirror to see if anything else was coming.

  They rode in silence out onto I-66, David driving a little fast. Anna finally relaxed enough to check her phone for messages and news. Besides the ongoing political wars between Democrats and Republicans, there were more tensions with Russia: in the Baltic Sea, a Russian Su-24 fighter jet had flown within sixty feet of a British Navy ship. There was also a vague report about a plan to attack American universities in the fall, with a “possible Russia link.” But once she got past the headline, Anna saw that the “plan” amounted to nothing more than an email exchange between two college students in North Dakota, one of them born in Russia.

  “So?” David said, as if they’d arrived in a safety zone. “What’s going on, Mom?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re back three days early. Chris isn’t with you. There were VIPR teams at the airport. There’s been a spike in troll activity and some strange cyber hacks over the past two days—”

  Anna turned off her phone. “I told you, Chris was called away on business.” They rode in silence for another mile, Anna watching the mirrored office buildings, the gauzy afterglows of sunset. “But tell me about that,” she said. “A ‘spike in troll activity’?”

  “Yeah.” David glanced at his mother. “Just—some weird stuff coming across.”

  “Okay. And could you be a tad more specific?”

  David smiled. He cleared his throat unnecessarily, a habit from his teenage years. Sometimes, Anna learned things by comparing notes with her son. But it usually took a little prodding. “The intel is that Russia is planning something against NATO, right? Or against us?” Anna allowed a small “mmm-hmm,” to keep him going. “Isn’t that why there were VIPR teams at the airport?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “What’s the ‘weird’ part?”

  “The weird part is there’s tons of online activity all of a sudden saying the opposite.”

  “Really. The opposite being what—that we’re planning something against Russia?”

  “Yeah.” He gave her an appraising glance. “You don’t know about that?”

  “No, I guess I don’t.” Anna wondered if this was why David had seemed so anxious to pick her up at the airport tonight. “What sites are we talking about?”

  “Military websites at first. But it’s all over Twitter now.”

  “Think you could show me?”

  “Sure. If you want.”

  Anna knew that Russia’s so-called troll factories churned out thousands of phony Internet posts each day, flooding Western news sites with pro-Russia and anti-Western opinions, along with fabricated stories promoting Moscow’s agendas. The government also sponsored automated bot programs that repackaged pro-Russia opinions and had managed to plant malware on systems throughout the United States. The Kremlin actively recruited freelancers—some of them students, some from the cybercrime underworld—for this work, for what were euphemistically called “science squads.” Washington didn’t have an equivalent program or effective countermeasures, and there were moral and ethical questions about how far the US should go in developing them. For years—as a congresswoman and as an intelligence analyst at the State Department—Anna had pushed for a stronger legal framework for cyberwarfare, without much success.

  “Did you say cyber attacks, too? Against us?”

  “No, cyber hacks,” David said. “Against us, NATO, European governments. You know what Russia’s motto is, right, Mom? Do unto others as you think they’re going to do unto you.”

  Anna laughed. That sounded right. She was reminded of Putin’s famous remark about ISIS in Syria: “As I learned on the streets of Leningrad, if a fight is inevitable, then you strike first.”

  “So what do you think?” she said. “What are you hearing?”

  “Something in the Baltics?” He exhaled dramatically. “I mean. Russia could move on Latvia or Belarus in three or four days and we couldn’t do much to stop them, right?”

  “Maybe,” Anna said. “But not without creating international outrage.”

  He seemed to hesitate before a
greeing with her. “Unless they were able to convince people that they had a legitimate reason for it.”

  “Is that what you’re hearing?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I’m just saying it’s possible.”

  “Okay.” Anna thought about that, and the scenario in the Baltics that had been talked about for years: Russia creates a pretext for striking a NATO neighbor. NATO is then forced under Article 5 to respond. If it doesn’t, Russia has, among other things, rendered NATO obsolete.

  David glanced at his mother expectantly now, as if she were going to tell him more. But she wasn’t; she was thinking. They settled into a long silence, coming at last to the rolling, leafy suburban neighborhood where Anna lived. Her house was a split-level, built in the early sixties; it had come with an acre of property and a creek, which created the illusion of being in the country even though she lived just ten minutes from the Capital Beltway.

  Anna’s nearly identical dachshunds, Zoey and Mr. Smith, skittered maniacally to greet her as she came in, their toenails scratching on the hardwood floor. It was Wednesday, so Carlotta, her housekeeper, was off until morning. It felt good to see the familiar furnishings, the antique chairs and tables Anna had inherited from her grandparents, the art pieces she’d collected in her travels, the pile of New Yorkers, the photos of family and of people she’d known during her career in public service.

  Anna knelt to give the dogs some attention and they quickly rolled onto their backs in surrender mode. “How’s Mr. Smith?” she said, rubbing his belly. “How’s Zoey?” The dogs had been named as pups eight years ago. David had suggested “Joey” and “Zoey.” David’s father— Anna’s ex—thought that Mr. and Mrs. Smith would be funny names, for some reason. So, in the way that family decisions were made back then, they compromised, ending up with Zoey and Mr. Smith. It struck Anna as a very Washington kind of solution.