The Plot to Kill Putin

by Max Karpov

  “That’s my fourth assumption. And that’s where we may be able to capitalize on a weakness in Delkoff: his fanatic brand of patriotism.”

  “Go on.”

  “Delkoff once told a Russian journalist that he admired Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb whose assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 set off World War I. He wants to be known for playing a role in Russian history. He doesn’t want to be a footnote. And I think that will work to our advantage. Either way—whether he’s alive or dead—I suspect Delkoff may leave behind evidence implicating Turov. And—if we’re lucky—the Kremlin.”

  Lindgren sighed through his nose, not quite with him. “I should tell you,” he said, glancing at Anna, who was attentively taking in their conversation, “I sat with the president and the national security adviser for a few minutes this afternoon, and they’ve already got good intel on this. And their explanation isn’t what you’re telling me. Not at all.”

  Chris raised his eyebrows, pretending to show concern. Good, he thought.

  “They have intelligence tying this back to a missile commander from the Ukrainian security services,” Martin said. “A man named Kolchak. But they think the order probably came from the Russian military. There are reports that at least two of the men involved have already been killed and ID’d at a checkpoint in Ukraine.”

  “Okay.”

  “I brought up Turov’s name and the response was underwhelming,” Martin added. “The Russian Ops Desk doesn’t believe it. The national security adviser doesn’t think he’s involved. There are even some stories, evidently, that Turov is gravely ill or dead.”

  Chris frowned so that he wouldn’t smile. “Turov’s not dead. But it doesn’t surprise me he’d put that story out. They never took Turov seriously enough, as you know. The White House seems to be playing this exactly as he wants.”

  “And so—what are you suggesting?”

  Chris took a long breath, and thought of downtown Moscow: the lights and traffic along Tverskaya Street, the ripe scent of the Moskva River, the spicy-doughy aromas from the Georgian restaurant near his old office. “Does your offer still stand?”

  “I don’t know. Did I make one?”

  “In Greece you said, quote, I’m not talking about a team of four or five at this point,” Chris said. “I took that to mean an offer might be coming at some future point.”

  “To do—?”

  “I want to go over and track down Turov,” he said. “And have someone else go after Delkoff. Either to find him or, if he’s not alive, to find what he left behind.”

  “Okay,” Martin said, tentatively. “And what will you do if you find Turov?”

  Chris said nothing at first. He was still working through the details. “I think I can get Turov to talk with me,” he said. “Maybe to deal. Turov’s an extraordinary strategist, as we know. An extraordinary man, in some ways. But it’s the ordinary parts of him that interest me.”

  “Go on.”

  “His operation has been a success so far,” Chris said. “But he’s going to have to share that success with the president. And eventually that will become a problem, given their personalities. I can maybe hasten the process along.” He glanced at Anna, knowing that Martin still wasn’t with him. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he continued. “Maybe I won’t be able to get anything. But even if I don’t, we’re only talking about a two-man op. And this is what your division does. Right?”

  Martin smiled mysteriously, glancing at Anna again. “And here I thought you wanted nothing more to do with Turov,” he said. “I thought you wanted to put him behind you.”

  “I did. Then the plane happened. I see what this is now.”

  Martin’s assent was all in his eyes. Chris wasn’t ready to lay out all the specifics of what he was thinking. He wasn’t ready to tell him about what he considered his “secret weapon” in Moscow. But he knew Martin wasn’t expecting that. Instead, he explained his idea in general terms. Martin listened, pretending to be slightly more skeptical than he was. And when he finished, he could see that Martin would go for it—some permutation of it, anyway—as long as he kept it small, and it didn’t interfere with what the White House was doing. “I already have someone to help with Delkoff,” he said.

  “‘Someone’?”

  “Jake Briggs.” Martin showed his sour-fruit grimace. “I know. But the thing is, Briggs has a bead on Ivan Delkoff. I just spoke with him. He worked with him before, an operation in Estonia five years ago. Believe me, the HUMINT on Delkoff will be worth more than anything we’re going to get out of Fort Meade.”

  Briggs is also a wilder breed of soldier, unpredictable and a little crazy, and we may need that to get to Delkoff, Chris thought.

  “Just you two.”

  “There’s weakness in numbers,” Chris said. “Right?”

  Martin allowed a brief smile. “And what would you need?”

  “Transportation, cover, a weapon for Briggs. A G-5 to bring us home would be nice. That’s all. Five, six days tops. Frankly, I don’t think we’ll have the luxury to go that long. You see what’s happened in just the past four hours.”

  “You want to run it black, independent of the IC,” Martin said.

  “I think we’d have to.” It was what Martin wanted, too, of course; it was what AS Division did. Alternate Scenarios. But Martin was playing this a little coy, seeing how revved up Chris was.

  “So,” he said, “you’re suggesting we do an end run around the entire intelligence community?”

  “Someone has to,” Chris said. Martin broke into a rare full smile. “Give me six days. If I’m wrong, you don’t lose much. If we wait until the administration figures this out and builds consensus, it may be too late.”

  “And what does Anna do?” It was clear to Chris that he wanted Anna involved. They’d worked together once before, he knew, during her years at the State Department, although Anna had never really talked about it. Chris averted his eyes now, letting her tell him.

  “We were talking in Greece, after you left,” she said, “about Russia waging a non-linear, non-military war. A war of perception.”

  “The Gerasimov Doctrine,” Martin said.

  “Yes.” They shared a quick, knowing look. The Gerasimov Doctrine was Russia’s vision of twenty-first-century warfare, a form of combat that relied primarily on the tools of emerging technologies rather than traditional military weapons. “That war’s already started, I think,” Anna said. “They’ve just created the narrative for it. We need to create a better one. I’ve got a few ideas how to do that.”

  Martin gave Anna a long look, as if this were a conversation to be continued later. Despite his somewhat jaded demeanor, Martin Lindgren was an optimist, who believed what Anna did: that the US was fundamentally a good nation, with deep reserves of decency, but sometimes, because of that decency, it was a country that didn’t anticipate evil very well. It didn’t foresee the extent of dishonesty and deceit driving its enemies or know how best to respond. Its dishonesty was less sophisticated than Russia’s. “When do you start?” he said.

  “Now,” Anna said.

  Chris nodded. “Russia’s going to shut down to Americans very quickly, I suspect. I’d like to fly over tomorrow. That would get me there on the afternoon of the fifteenth.”

  “And what if we’re already ahead of you?” Lindgren’s blue eyes seemed to momentarily sparkle.

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  Now it was Martin’s turn to surprise. “You’re going to Moscow to research a story,” he said. “You’re a college instructor researching a piece you’re writing for an online think tank. About the changing role of the Russian Orthodox Church. We’ve lined up two interviews in Moscow. A historian at the Carnegie Moscow Center and an Orthodox priest. Beyond that, you’ll be on your own.”

  Christopher said nothing at first. They had already prepared a cover for him, not expecting it would be needed so soon. Knowing the Orthodox church was a subject that interested him. “They’re not go
ing to buy that, of course,” he said.

  “Probably not. But we can’t have you going over as a CIA contractor, can we?”

  Martin shared a smile with Anna.

  “And what made you think I’d be doing this?” Christopher said.

  “Hope springs eternal.”

  “I guess it does.”

  So. It wasn’t only Russia that was good at deception, Chris thought.

  Anna and Christopher walked across the parking lot to their cars without speaking. The warmth and humidity had seeped from the air in the last hour of daylight; the leaves seemed to synchronize in a long, slow rustle. When they reached her car, Anna turned and touched his face tenderly. Christopher looked toward the city, and he recognized the act of faith they were all sharing by doing this: they were rejecting almost categorically the possibility that the United States had been involved in an assassination attempt on the president of Russia.

  “Race you home,” he said.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Weekly American offices. Foggy Bottom, Washington.

  I guess I’d like to know more about your mystery source,” Roger Yorke said to Jon Niles. The longtime editor sat on a corner of his desk with his long legs crossed and patted absently at his mop of gray hair. “We all would,” he added.

  “Right,” Jon said, feeling three sets of eyes on him: those of Roger and staff writers Elizabeth Foster and KC Walls. KC was the magazine’s new political reporter, a talented, ambitious twenty-seven-year-old with unruly red hair and freckles, who had ninety-seven thousand Twitter followers and appeared occasionally as a guest commentator on MSNBC. Jon sensed that she was angling for a way in to the Russia story, even though it wasn’t her turf.

  “Last night, you told me about this ‘no fingerprints’ business,” Roger said. “Now the same words are all over the Internet, and our country’s credibility is being challenged.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s kind of, like, a big deal, isn’t it?” Elizabeth said, her eyes shifting from Jon to Roger. Jon felt an inexplicable clutch in his chest. Liz had been his girlfriend for two years, and she still got to him: just that habitual widening of her eyes, the way her voice quivered slightly on isn’t it? “It’s almost starting to remind me of Iran–Contra,” she added, looking to Jon for a nod of approval.

  “From what KC was just telling me,” Roger said, ignoring Liz’s comment, “someone at the NSC level is confirming what your source said—that there was a discussion of preemptive action, which would leave no US fingerprints, quote unquote. We need to find who that was.”

  Jon sighed. KC, he suspected, was fudging a little.

  “Actually, I probably shouldn’t say this,” KC said, scooting forward, her eyes staying with Roger. “Because it was said in confidence. But, for the sake of the story: I heard that the Post may also have an anonymous source on it. A woman. So it’s possible the same source has been calling multiple media outlets.”

  “A telephone source?” Jon said.

  “I think so,” she said. Speaking to Roger.

  “And maybe they’re having the same conversation we’re having?” Liz added, irrelevantly.

  “Can you find out any more on that, then?” Roger said, his eyes gesturing to KC. “If you’re comfortable with it.”

  “Sure.”

  Jon huffed, almost involuntarily. Roger, he suspected, had invited KC to this meeting as a way of kicking his ass a little, shaking off some of his cynicism about journalism. Occasionally, these Weekly American staff meetings felt almost like interventions. But he didn’t need that today. After his conversation with 9:15, Jon was fully engaged.

  “It’s interesting,” Roger said, looking distractedly out the picture window. “The academics talk about Russia as a country in search of an idea. But I think they have one. Two, really, which go hand in hand. The first is to position themselves as a moral leader for the rest of the world, an alternative to what they call the decadence of the West. Us. And the second is to create a Eurasian alliance that diminishes the importance of our alliances. That’s what’s behind BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which they see as alternatives to NATO and the IMF. And now they’re talking about creating a new international apparatus to fight terrorism, which would bypass military blocs such as NATO.”

  “But—so what else are you hearing about the preemptive strike thing?” KC asked, scooting forward. Roger’s tangents made KC uneasy.

  “What I’m hearing,” he said, “is that preemptive action was discussed, as Jon said, but probably not as a real option.” He glanced at Jon. “Although what really concerns me right now is something else; it’s the story the administration is starting to tell internally, that the attack was a coup. That it was the Russian military that shot down the president’s plane.”

  KC frowned.

  “What concerns you about it?” Liz said.

  “What concerns me is that no one seems to know exactly where it’s coming from. There’s a feeling I’m getting—from a good source now— that it may be based on very weak intelligence,” he said. “Or worse.”

  “Oh,” KC said, getting it.

  “In other words, some senior officials are worried that we may be about to push a story forward just to slow down Russia’s story about us,” Roger said. “Generally, fighting disinformation with disinformation is not a good idea. Especially on this scale.” He peered at his bookshelf, which was stuffed with history and philosophy texts. “The concern is, if we rush out a story that doesn’t hold, then we look like we’re covering something up.”

  “Which would only strengthen the Russian version,” Jon said, noticing how KC’s eyes widened at the words “covering something up.”

  “It’s not possible we are covering something up, is it?” Liz asked.

  “Well. I would hope not.” Roger gave her what Jon thought of as his paternal look. “There is a group within the administration, of course—and Jon has written about this—that’s been saying Russia is an underrated threat. And there’s also been the suggestion, online, that this might have been carried out by some sort of star-chamber group within the administration, independent of the White House.” Jon saw Liz mouth the word Wow. “But I would place that in the category of unfounded conspiracy theories at this point.”

  KC watched Roger Yorke attentively. But Roger’s thoughts had moved on. “It’s funny, I’ve always thought Russia’s need for autocratic control was a result of its unwieldy size,” he said, glancing out the window again. “It gives them a perpetual inferiority complex. Eleven time zones, two hundred nationalities. Eleven percent of the world’s landmass.”

  “But a population less than half the size of ours,” Jon offered.

  “Yes.” Roger let his eyes rest on Jon’s for a moment. “And so: let’s go at this full throttle and see what happens.” He nodded to Elizabeth and KC, in turn, which was his way of thanking them but also dismissing them. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk with Jon for a minute.”

  KC wasn’t pleased by this. Jon could see it in the flippancy of her body language as she rose and strode stiff-legged from the room. Her mood shifts could be abrupt, and not always synced properly with her personality. Liz, following behind, turned in the doorway to trade a smile with him. Jon got up to close the door.

  “I do want to keep you on this,” Roger said, playing with the knot on his loosened tie. “Assuming you’re interested.”

  “Of course I am.”

  Roger’s face crinkled in a preparatory way, which meant he was about to reveal something candid. “Just so you know, KC’s a fine reporter, on congressional politics and the environment, but this isn’t her bailiwick. I know who her source is. So don’t worry. This is your story. But I do think we need to shift to a higher gear now.

  “It’s complicated by the fact that there are competing accounts out there. Noise at the expense of comprehension, as you like to say.” He fixed Jon with his most direct look, which was always a little disconcert
ing. “What can you tell me about your sources on these Russia meetings? You’ve heard it now from three people?”

  “Including my 9:15 caller, yes, three and a half,” Jon said. Roger nodded for him to explain. “9:15 was the first. Then Craig Kettles, the congressman, talking off the record, who told me there’d been discussion of preemptive action, although he claims he wasn’t in these meetings. Then 9:15 called a second time and used the word ‘strike.’” Roger nodded almost imperceptibly. “I then went to two people in the IC who confirmed the meetings happened, but wouldn’t discuss details. Then one of them walked it back when I brought it up again on Tuesday.”

  “When you say walked it back—”

  “Denied it,” Jon said.

  “Denied preemptive action was discussed? Or denied the meetings happened?”

  “Both. Said I misunderstood his answer. Now he won’t return my calls.”

  “Mmm.” Roger nodded as if all of this were making sense to him. “Okay, so—three and a half, I see.” He looked toward the Mall, his eyes receding slightly in the light. “The one who walked it back—would that be Harland Strickland, possibly?”

  Jon frowned. “How—?”

  “He did the same with someone else. Strickland’s the main driver, I’m told, behind this coup narrative,” Roger said, his eyes back with Jon.

  “I need to talk with Strickland again, then.”

  “Yes. Good.” He studied Jon. “How much help are you going to need on this?”

  “Help? None,” Jon said. “Let me pursue my sources for a couple days, see what I can find.”

  “Good.” Roger Yorke seemed to like that. Jon wondered if this was the real purpose of today’s meeting. “All right, then,” he said, smiling faintly. “Just keep in touch.”

  “I will.” Jon walked out of Roger’s corner office fired up, ready to exorcise the Jon Niles who drank beer every night and wasted his evenings. Roger was nudging him to something better. Nudging him awake . . . Maybe that’s your story, 9:15 had told him. No, maybe you’re the story, Jon thought.