The Plot to Kill Putin

by Max Karpov

  She didn’t greet him. Didn’t say anything. Then he saw why.

  “What the fuck—?”

  Briggs moved closer, seeing the footage of the Russian president’s plane exploding midair. The Fox Breaking News banner across the bottom of the screen ran: PUTIN DEAD.

  Donna muted the sound and spoke low, so the kids wouldn’t hear. “They were just saying it’s ninety-nine percent certain that he was on board.”

  “Jesus, what happened?”

  “Terrorism, I guess. They don’t know yet.” She handed him his phone. Briggs took it, keeping his eyes on the TV. When he finally looked down, he saw a missed call notification, and a name from his past: Christopher Niles. Briggs knew immediately that the events had to be related; Chris was calling because of the attack on Russia’s president. He had to be.

  Briggs walked down the hall to his own office and returned the call, but got Niles’s voice mail. He began to click through television channels. Watching as the commentators struggled to explain what had no explanation yet.

  When he stopped sweating, Briggs took a quick shower. Then he went into the living room to be with his kids Jamie and Jessie. Wanting to feel normal again for a few minutes, he tried watching the video with them—some animated caveman movie called The Croods. But Briggs couldn’t sit still. He went back outside, walking down the gravel drive to the main road, checking news updates on his phone.

  Briggs was a retired officer with the Navy’s Special Warfare Development Group—known as SEAL Team Six—who now operated a small military contracting business from his home in rural western Virginia. Years earlier, he had run night rescue missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan and helped train his military counterparts in both countries. During his seven-year stint as a SEAL, Briggs had occasionally displayed an independence and defensiveness that had gotten him in trouble. “His idle is set too high,” one commanding officer had written. The word among his superiors became that Briggs had issues with authority, which had been particularly evident during a joint ops with the CIA in Estonia, a job he probably shouldn’t have taken.

  Pushed out of the SEALS a few months later, Briggs returned to Virginia to start his life over. It had been a rough transition. He’d failed in his first contracting venture and went through several months of depression, beating himself up over it. After another false start, Briggs had lowered his expectations and managed to build a small security business from scratch. He now recruited former SEALS and men from its army counterpart, Delta Force, along with other ex-military. He’d even managed to sell his services back to the government a few times, although most of his work these days was far more mundane than hostage rescues. His biggest contract now was providing onboard security for container ships off the coast of Somalia.

  Briggs had met Christopher Niles five years ago on a special op to force Russian-sponsored aggressors out of Estonia, a mission that was never publicized. Niles, the CIA liaison for the SEAL team, was the most focused man Briggs had ever known in the IC, and also among the smartest. Although, to Briggs, that wasn’t saying a lot. Chris Niles had a disciplined, inborne intelligence, a way of cutting through the bullshit, the hypocrisy and bureaucracy. He also knew, as Briggs did, that some rules needed to be broken. And that sometimes it was okay to forget the finer gradations and see a problem in its most basic terms. Terrorism was his favorite example. Briggs had gotten close enough, often enough, to know that terrorists, while technically human beings, were a more primitive species; that their chemical makeup contained the instincts of a barbaric medievalism; and that if those instincts were allowed to survive and flourish, they had the capacity to destroy civilization. Not by ingenuity or force of numbers or any of that, just by sheer dumb tenacity; if they were able to get control of a nuclear weapon, which wasn’t as far-fetched as people thought, then they could win. Terrorism was in a fight with civilization, a war it shouldn’t by rights even be allowed to enter. But Washington didn’t understand that; it didn’t know how to defend itself effectively.

  The assassination in Ukraine was clearly terrorism, although Briggs couldn’t say yet what kind. He knew a little about the Russian president; knew that he’d stolen the equivalent of millions of dollars while in St. Petersburg in the 1990s and gotten away with it; that he’d later steered much more than that—billions—into personal accounts while serving as Russia’s president (and earning an annual salary of about $187,000). But in a culture that rewarded corruption, Briggs didn’t especially fault him for that. He was more bothered by the people who’d died because of his oppressive policies, and in the wars that Russia had fought since 1999, some known by the public, some not.

  “What’s going on?”

  Jake’s son Jamie was in the doorway. He’d wandered away from The Croods, sensing something was up. Briggs felt an impulse to shield his son. Then he thought better of it. Instead, Briggs punched up the sound. “It’s the president of Russia,” he said. Jamie stared, shuffling into the room, his light brown eyes wide, his hair mussed from lying against the sofa pillows. “That was his plane. They blew it up.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Not officially. But, yeah. He’s dead.”

  His boy stared at the screen. It hurt Briggs, seeing him like that, as the cable channel replayed the explosion over and over and over. He thought of something Donna had said, when they’d first started dating, back when she still talked about such things: When we truly love someone, we give them the power to break our hearts. “Who killed him?” Jamie asked.

  “Terrorists.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know. They didn’t want him alive any longer, I guess. Come here,” he said. Briggs grabbed his son and swung him onto his knee, lowering the volume again. He watched his son’s face as he stared at the television, Jamie’s eyes riveted by the replay. Briggs realized: Jamie would remember this afternoon for the rest of his life. He’d remember sitting on his old man’s knee on the day that Vladimir Putin was blown out of the skies over Ukraine. He’d remember the moment. This moment. Right now. Long after Briggs was gone, his son would think back to this warm summer afternoon in Virginia. He would tell people about it. This moment. Right now.

  “Why didn’t they want him to live?”

  “There’s no good way to explain it, Jamie,” Briggs said. “Except some people think he’s a bad man. And I guess they thought he’d become too powerful.”

  “So they killed him?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Who are they?” he asked. “The tear-iss?”

  “We don’t know who they are,” Briggs said, his eyes suddenly tearing up with emotion. Briggs had seen men blown up in battle several times; he’d exchanged last looks with dying soldiers. Those things never went away. But the look on Jamie’s face right now went deeper because it was his own flesh and blood.

  In fact, Briggs had been wondering the same thing as Jamie: Who were these terrorists? Ukrainian rebels? Chechen extremists? It could even be the right wing within Russia, the generals. Or an organized crime group working a contract; or one of Putin’s enemies who’d somehow managed to get a bomb inside the plane. In a country where nearly half of the economy was based on corruption, anything was possible and the truth was hard to know. It was like having The Godfather as a national model.

  “He doesn’t need to see that,” Donna snapped, her voice startling them both. Their heads turned simultaneously to the doorway. Jake muted the sound.

  “He’s all right,” he said lamely.

  “Jacob!”

  Briggs turned it off to make peace. Jamie pouted for a while, storming around the way he did, thrusting his arms out, until Briggs escorted him back to the living room and Jessie and the movie. But none of that interested Jamie anymore, and he kept looking up at his dad as if trying to glean information from his eyes.

  Briggs wondered if Donna would’ve let Jamie watch the planes going into the Trade Towers in 2001. He would have; of course he would. Kids should know
what evil looks like. Why not? It was one of his country’s character flaws, he thought, although Donna disagreed. Briggs had never been big on the idea of sheltering kids. Or the everyone-gets-a-trophy mentality. What passed for fairness and equality these days was eroding America’s best qualities, Briggs thought, basic stuff like individualism and the pursuit of excellence. The whole concept of guaranteed “equality” made him nauseous, although Donna didn’t agree with that, either.

  Briggs took the return call from Christopher Niles on the deck, picturing his old colleague: tall, intense, with silver-blue eyes, dark blond hair, an athlete’s build. It struck him as funny—hard to imagine, really—that this former intel officer was a university teacher now, standing in front of spoiled rich kids in a D.C. classroom talking about Russia.

  “You’ve seen the news,” Chris said.

  “Watching it now. What’s up?”

  The sun was low over the trees, a jagged line in the mist. Soft breezes blew across the yard. It felt like a storm coming. “I need your help,” Christopher said. “It has to do with Ivan Delkoff.” The name sent a jolt through Briggs. Chris didn’t repeat it, or offer a lot by way of explanation. But he didn’t have to. The name was enough. “Can you meet me in the morning?”

  “Yeah. Of course,” Jake said. His thoughts had already shifted away from this Virginia countryside to a street in Estonia, and to Delkoff, a huge man, cursed with perhaps the most serious-looking face Briggs had ever seen: long, nearly lipless, with a shaved pate, large nose, and small concentrated eyes. At first, for a few seconds anyway, Delkoff’s size had unnerved him. But they’d ended friendly, even though working for different sides, spending more than an hour together at a restaurant in Narva drinking Estonian beers. Delkoff knew no English, Briggs little Russian or Estonian, but they’d talked in French, Delkoff bragging on his son. He had big hopes for his boy, who was going to become an intelligence officer one day, he said.

  Briggs walked back inside the house and told his wife that Christopher Niles had just offered him a job. Her arms remained crossed. “What’d you tell him?”

  “He wants to meet me tomorrow. I told him I’d be there.” In a heartbeat. He didn’t say that. He didn’t say that he was going to get to work right away, either, digging into his old files on Ivan Delkoff before catching three or four hours’ sleep.

  They stared at the silent TV together, the loop of the explosion still playing behind the pundits’ commentary. “Is it about that?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” Christopher hadn’t said. Not technically. When she looked at him again, he searched for something in his wife’s eyes that resembled approval. He didn’t find it. But this was his family, so that was all right.

  “I guess I’ll find out tomorrow,” he said.

  SIXTEEN

  CIA headquarters. Langley, Virginia.

  Martin Lindgren looked up at Christopher from behind his desk, his eyes flat, his graceful features drained of their vitality. The concerns that had caused Martin to travel all the way to the Cyclades Islands to find him made a lot more sense now.

  “You understand this,” Martin said.

  “Some of it.”

  “Have a seat.”

  The two men eyed each other as Christopher settled. In retrospect, there’d been at least two warning signs that he should’ve picked up on. But what most concerned Chris now, if his assumptions were correct, was that Turov’s operation had an enormous—maybe insurmountable—head start, and the intelligence community probably wasn’t even aware of it. He wondered if he’d be able to sell Martin on his idea, and how tightly the White House was going to keep its reins on this.

  “Anna’s coming to join us, by the way.”

  “Good.” Martin’s face momentarily brightened, as he had expected. Martin appreciated the depth of Anna’s experience and know-how. Plus, he liked her personally.

  “How were your briefings?” Chris began. Martin’s mouth twisted and he shrugged. “You talked about how unlikely this was, I imagine. You talked about all the ways it was wrong.” Martin nodded slightly. “Wrong that the Russian president’s plane didn’t have working missile defenses. Wrong that it was flying over a corner of Ukrainian air space. Wrong that a president obsessed with being in control would have allowed his plane to become that vulnerable.”

  “Okay,” Martin Lindgren said. “And that’s significant because—?”

  “It’s significant because it means Putin wasn’t on board that plane,” Christopher said. “He couldn’t have been.”

  Chris’s old boss looked at him steadily, as if it were taking a while for his words to cross the room. “Except,” Martin said, “all of the reports we’re getting say he was. There’s footage of him arriving on the tarmac. We have good Russian sources saying he was on board.” Their eyes turned simultaneously to the TV across the room, then back to their conversation.

  “Which might end up being the best evidence we’ll get that the president was complicit in this,” Christopher said.

  “You don’t actually know that. You’re speculating.”

  “I’m speculating.” He took a breath, willing himself to sound less certain. Of course he was speculating, but he was angry, because the reports implicating the United States were coming too quickly, as Anna said. And the US’s initial response felt weak, and wrong, as if there were some internal roadblocks he didn’t yet understand. “But I know Andrei Turov. I probably should have suspected this as soon as we had Delkoff’s name. I blame myself for that.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lindgren frowned, the vertical crease lines emerging between his heavy eyebrows. “How could we have known?”

  “Delkoff was a Russian GRU commander in the Ukrainian war for the past four years,” Christopher said. “He was responsible for shooting down dozens of Ukrainian military transport planes and helicopters. He may have even been involved in blowing up the Malaysia airliner in 2014. MH17. Maybe that’s what got Turov’s attention.”

  Martin shut his eyes for a second, revealing his reptilian eyelids.

  “My guess,” Chris said, “is that they’re going to float this idea that Putin’s dead for another few hours at least, as the general chaos of the story unfolds. Let it generate some international sympathy and outrage. Sometime tomorrow, then, the Kremlin will announce that the president’s alive. They’ll say they plan to vigorously track down whoever did this. Even if they have to chase them into the toilet,” he added.

  Martin allowed a small smile, acknowledging Christopher’s reference to Putin’s famous warning after the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999. “And then—?”

  “By then, the story of US involvement will have gone viral, as it’s already starting to do. Worst-case: We’re talking protests worldwide, flag burnings. Diplomatic freeze-outs. Talk of Russian retaliation.”

  Martin winced in that strange way he had, opening his mouth as if he’d crunched on a piece of sour fruit. “The Russian president wouldn’t have been involved in something like that,” he said.

  “No. I don’t think he was,” Chris said. “I think this is what Turov calls a parallel game. He advances the Kremlin’s agenda by doing things the Kremlin can’t do itself, for obvious reasons. My theory is, Turov took this plan to the president. The president listened. He wasn’t involved. Except he allowed it to happen.”

  “By not boarding that plane.”

  “That’s what I think. Maybe they’ll say his security services intercepted a last-minute warning that the US, or Ukraine, was planning an attack. Or some emergency caused Putin to miss the flight. I don’t know. Obviously, it will be difficult to prove. They’ve got plausible deniability. And in the meantime, we get blamed, our credibility takes a huge hit. Russia wants us to be perceived as what they actually are: a country not constrained at its highest levels by the law or by a sense of morality.”

  “Someone else had to be involved, though,” Martin said. “The pilot or air traffic control, someone who would have put the fli
ght on that route.”

  “That’s what we’ll need to find out.”

  The desk phone buzzed, interrupting them. Anna Carpenter had arrived.

  Martin Lindgren stood to greet Anna, putting on his charming face, kissing both cheeks and holding her hands before sitting down again.

  “The victims of the crash included a Chinese human rights advocate, I just heard,” Anna told them. “And an interior minister who’d been quietly critical of the president for some time.”

  “Convenient,” Chris said.

  Martin reached for his tea, his eyes staying with Anna. “What else do we have?”

  “I just sat in on an NSC meeting,” she said. “There’s clearly a division within the administration over how to respond. And how we respond, needless to say, is a big part of their calculation.”

  Martin nodded, still watching her.

  “In the plus column,” Chris said, “which is a very small column at this point: I think Delkoff’s involvement may give us an opening. If there’s a weak link in this, it’s probably him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of who he is. I’m going to make some assumptions here,” Chris said. “Ivan Delkoff may be the only person who could have made this happen. Delkoff knows eastern Ukraine, the checkpoints, the duplicitous players, the weapons traders. He’s probably dealt with this Hordiyenko and knows the anti-Putin forces there. Supposedly, he’s even become sympathetic to some of them lately, turning against the president.”

  “But then Delkoff wouldn’t have become involved unless he really thought he was killing the president,” Anna said.

  “Exactly,” Chris said. “Which is why Turov would have made sure Delkoff was killed, either during the operation or immediately after. That’s my second assumption.”

  “How many assumptions are you making?” Martin asked.

  “Four.”

  “Okay.”

  “Third assumption: Delkoff’s going to anticipate that and plan an escape. He’s resourceful, stubborn, and egotistical. He’s going to think that he can outplay Turov and the Kremlin’s intelligence services. Which maybe he can, for a while. But—assuming he’s still alive—he’s going to find out soon that Turov has used him and double-crossed him. And he’s probably going to want some sort of revenge.