The Plot to Kill Putin

by Max Karpov

  Delkoff blocked out the noise around him as he walked into the concourse at de Gaulle. He averted his eyes from the people gathered below a television set. Fighting the stimuli, the sounds and smells, the knowledge of what city he was in: all of it conspiring to stir his appetites—for conversation, for a large meal, for female companionship. Delkoff had to rely on his own internal disciplines now.

  He bought a liter of vodka at the duty-free shop, careful not to engage with the clerk, and then carried his purchase and his duffel bag to the open-air car park to meet his cousin. If he could keep his vices to vodka tonight, he would be fine.

  Little Dmitri looked the same as always, small and stout, wearing baggy old blue jeans, an open gray jacket, and an untucked flannel shirt, his brush-like mustache slightly lopsided, and walking in that determined straight-ahead way he had, the way he went through life. Delkoff loved him.

  “Well,” Delkoff said, trying to slow him down. “We did it.”

  But Dmitri didn’t want to discuss it now. “We’ll talk when we get there,” he said. He had a worried look on his face. But then, Dmitri always wore that look. “We can’t say anything in front of Artem, all right?”

  “Of course.” Artem was Little Dmitri’s driver and bodyguard, a former Russian soldier from the North Caucasus region who was nearly as big as Delkoff. Delkoff had been around him a few times before, but they’d never had a real conversation. Artem wasn’t much for small talk.

  Delkoff settled in the back seat of the SUV, feeling insulated as they pulled away from the terminal. Watching the airport parking lots and runways skim past, the lights of the Paris suburbs beginning, and then seeing the darker points of the countryside, Delkoff sipped from his vodka. The drive to the coast would take two and a half hours, Dmitri said. Delkoff was looking forward to seeing the ocean again, breathing the night sea air. It had been too many months.

  A CD of Russian folk music played quietly through the speakers, and no one spoke. It was not the sort of music Delkoff would ever play. But he began to hear familiar melodies and they reminded him of his parents, and the cooking smells from his old childhood kitchen in Kapotnya. Hearing the well-worn rhythms of “Kalinka,” Delkoff instructed Dmitri to turn it up. He began to tap along with his hand on the top of his thigh.

  “Play it again,” Delkoff said when it finished. Four more times they listened to the Russian folk song, Delkoff sipping his vodka and nodding his head in time.

  But even as he enjoyed the music, Delkoff wondered why they weren’t listening to news. Didn’t they want to know what was happening in Russia? Even if they weren’t able to talk about his operation, didn’t they want to know? Or was Dmitri overcompensating, as he often did?

  “Kalinka” ended for the fifth time and Delkoff asked Dmitri to turn it off. He wanted to think for a while. They rode for several kilometers in silence, Delkoff knowing by then that something was wrong. He should have asked Dmitri for an explanation straightaway, while they were still at the airport. He should have stopped him outside the terminal building and demanded that he tell him what he’d heard.

  He waited until they were on the westbound A13, a dozen or so kilometers outside the city. Then Delkoff leaned forward and tugged his cousin’s jacket collar.

  “Pull over,” he said. “Tell him to pull over. I need to piss.”

  Artem put on his flashers and pulled off to the hard shoulder of the highway. They sat there for a long moment as traffic whooshed by. Then Delkoff got out and stood waiting for his cousin. Dmitri came out with his jacket flapping in the wind.

  “Well?” he said. Delkoff turned away from the traffic, leading his cousin off the pavement. “What is it? What’s wrong? Has someone found out about me?”

  Little Dmitri just looked at his cousin, his eyes glistening in the night air. Delkoff breathing the exhaust from the SUV. “You don’t know?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Dmitri glanced at the dark countryside. He seemed to be summoning the courage to tell him. “The president,” he said. “You don’t know what happened?”

  “Of course, I know,” Delkoff said. “We shot his fucking plane out of the sky.”

  Dmitri’s eyes seemed to turn in on themselves. “The president,” he said. Then he began the sentence again: “The president wasn’t on board. He never boarded the plane. You don’t know that?”

  Ivan Delkoff stared at his little cousin as the traffic rushed past. He asked him to repeat what he had just said, because it didn’t make sense. Hearing it a second time, Delkoff grabbed Dmitri by the front of his jacket and lifted him off the ground. He felt so angry that he was tempted to carry his cousin to the highway and toss him into traffic. “What are you talking about? You’re lying!”

  “No, why would I be lying?” Dmitri said. “He’s still alive. They say he was given some warning at the last minute, telling him not to board.”

  Delkoff let go of his little cousin. This wasn’t the place to discuss it, but Dmitri tried anyway, his quavering voice drowned out by a passing truck. Delkoff turned away, letting out several profanities. He looked at the faraway glints: farms, houses; rooms where people were watching news of the Russian president on their televisions. He turned in place, looking several directions for somewhere to go. His life suddenly seemed like a cage.

  Returning to the back seat of the SUV, Delkoff felt enormously foolish. Too foolish to speak. He thought of his son’s charred face and felt himself beginning to cry. Artem raced the SUV into traffic, driving too fast to compensate for whatever was wrong.

  The magnitude of the betrayal was unfathomable. Andrei Turov had deceived him in a way that Delkoff had not even considered possible. And the worst part was the question that kept repeating in his head as he stared numbly at the passing French towns: Had Delkoff actually been working for the man he thought he was going to kill, then? Had the August 13 attack been set up by the president himself?

  If so—if Delkoff’s mission hadn’t been for Russia, and the greater good—then Delkoff was no better than a hired killer. They sped in silence through the darkening night, the fastest vehicle on the freeway, Delkoff drinking again, his window opened an inch for the cool air.

  Somehow, we’ll get through this, he began to tell himself as they drew nearer to the coast. Somehow, he’d endure this betrayal the way he had endured physical and emotional challenges all his life; he’d endure it the way any soldier did. Delkoff had seen most of the ways that men were diminished by war; he’d seen tough, wounded soldiers crying for their mothers on the battlefields of Chechnya and Ukraine; he’d seen separatist fighters in the Donbas raping a dead Ukrainian woman in a farmhouse once, laughing because there were others to share the experience; and he’d seen his son’s face, like a mask from some American horror movie, the features all burned off. Whether war finally ruined you or made you stronger, it always changed you. If you were lucky and brave enough, in time the bad made you good. It maybe even made you immune to the smiling dishonesty of the world, and made you think that nothing could get to you anymore. Delkoff had thought that on occasion.

  But here was something that had: Andrei Turov, Russia’s “dark angel,” had completely outplayed him with his dark magic. August 13 had been the opposite of what Turov told him it was. It had been an operation to strengthen the president, not kill him.

  Delkoff had never believed that Andrei Turov would simply let him go. That’s why he’d planned an elaborate escape. But he didn’t think Turov was lying to him, either, when he’d said, in his candid voice, “You are the only one who can do this successfully.”

  On the two-lane coast road they passed sand-dune beaches and rock pools. Half a dozen seaside towns whipped by, the air windy and smelling of sea brine. But Delkoff barely noticed. Not until Artem pulled off onto a rough gravel-dirt road, stopping by a tiny restaurant on a hill. The terrace was lit with a string of colored Christmas lights.

  Dmitri turned to face his cousin. “I’m just going in to buy a bottle
of wine. I’ll be right out.” Artem left the engine running.

  Delkoff lowered the window, beginning to feel a little better. He gazed at the old couples sitting at small tables on the terrace and it felt very inviting to him, a warm, civilized slice of the world. Artem, he saw, was watching him in the rearview mirror.

  Dmitri returned with his bottle of red wine and they continued into the darkness away from the coast. Delkoff saw where they were headed: a porchlight in the rolling country, a two-story restored stone farmhouse on a property owned by Dmitri’s ex-wife’s family. He saw the shapes of a barn and a smaller stone house behind it as Artem parked. “Here we are,” Dmitri said. “This will be your home now for a day or two.”

  Delkoff was silent. He followed Dmitri inside. There was an old-wood, slightly moldy smell in the house. Delkoff took his duffel bag and vodka upstairs to a small corner bedroom with a beamed ceiling. He closed the door and opened the windows, tuned to the silence and to his own thoughts.

  By that point, Delkoff was beginning to formulate a plan: Turov was the enemy now, and Delkoff’s most effective move would be a direct strike on Turov’s vulnerability, an attack that Turov would not anticipate. Delkoff knew how to do that.

  Once he’d decided on the basic details, Delkoff went downstairs to tell his cousin. Dmitri and Artem were in the living room, watching the news on RT Français.

  “Come outside with me for a minute,” Delkoff said to Dmitri.

  They walked together across the scrubby field, Delkoff breathing the grassy freedom of country in the freshening night air, savoring what he had now in his head.

  Artem stepped out too, watching them from the doorway.

  “We can’t stay here. You know that,” Delkoff said. Stopping, he tried to pass his cousin the vodka; Dmitri wouldn’t take it.

  “That was never the plan,” Dmitri said. “We can still travel to Germany tomorrrow.”

  Delkoff shook his head. He looked up, and pointed at the sky.

  “You know what those are, Dmitri?”

  “What do you mean—the stars?”

  “No. Some of them are stars. Some of them aren’t stars.”

  Dmitri’s wide forehead creased as he gazed up. “What are you talking about?”

  Delkoff took a drink of vodka. He screwed the lid back on. “Some of them are stars and some of them are satellites. It wouldn’t surprise me if some were watching us right now.” They both looked at the canopy of stars. “But you know what? I have something more valuable than anything they have now, Dmitri. Right here.”

  He tapped the side of his head. His cousin didn’t understand at first.

  “There’s enough right here to bring down the president of Russia, if I wanted to, Dmitri, you know that? And I do want to. I’ve decided. I need to borrow a computer. Do you have one I can use?”

  “Of course.”

  He told him the rest as they walked back to the house, their boots crunching across the dirt and gravel.

  “I’m going upstairs and I’m going to write for a while. When I finish, we can make a decision about tomorrow.”

  Delkoff set up his cousin’s computer on a small wooden table against the wall. Then he began to write, pecking at the keys of the Cyrillic keyboard with his index fingers, like an accountant punching numbers on an adding machine. What he was creating would be Delkoff’s official account of what had happened on August 13 and what had led up to it. A confession, in effect, although he preferred to call it his “Declaration.” That was the word he typed at the top of the first page. A “Declaration” that would implicate not only Andrei Turov, but also Vladimir Putin, in the attack on the presidential plane. Which was really an attack on the West. He understood that now.

  His feelings of anger and humiliation were outweighed by a compulsion to do right. Delkoff felt a surge of excitement every time he recognized what he was doing: creating the historic record of August 13. It was even possible that he could sell this document to the Americans.

  As he wrote, Delkoff began to understand a deeper truth, and it humbled him: the assignment that Andrei Turov had handed him back in April wasn’t his destiny, as he’d thought at the time. But this was. The air cooled and moistened as he worked, the smells of hay and sea water thickening as the window curtains puffed out with the breeze, an eerie, gentle sensation that reminded Delkoff for some reason of coming to the Black Sea as a boy, and watching the great Russian Navy ships from the docks. Delkoff didn’t sleep much at night anyway, so he was pleased to have this new mission before him.

  But at 9:50, he saw that he was about to run out of vodka, and the vodka was helping him write. Delkoff walked downstairs to ask his cousin if there was any more in the house. Dmitri and Artem were still watching the news.

  “We don’t keep vodka here,” Dmitri told him.

  “Then we’ll have to go out and get some.” He held up the nearly empty bottle.

  “We can’t. Not this late.”

  Delkoff looked at the clock on the mantel. “What about your friend at the restaurant?” he said. “Won’t he sell us a bottle?”

  “He might.” Dmitri looked at him disapprovingly.

  “Then let’s go.”

  “You can’t leave.”

  But Delkoff didn’t want to stay. Not tonight. Dmitri pulled on his old jacket and the three of them went out again: Artem driving the SUV back up the gravel road toward the coast. Delkoff in the back seat again, breathing the sea breeze, the taste of alcohol a desperate but delicious craving. It wasn’t smart being out like this, he knew, but Delkoff didn’t care. The world’s horizons seemed enormous again.

  He agreed to stay with Artem in the car as Dmitri went in the little restaurant. Delkoff let the window down. He listened to the ocean. Artem’s eyes were watching him again in the mirror.

  “You smell that?” he said to Artem.

  “Smell what?”

  “French air,” he said. “Not like the air in Russia.”

  Artem lifted his nose and turned his head slightly. Delkoff was amused by the way his giant nostrils quivered. “Smells the same to me,” he said.

  Watching stars over the Channel, Delkoff imagined what was coming. Imagined his enemy, Turov, the Russian coward, the president’s lapdog. What he really wanted now was to contact the Americans. That was his future now: across the ocean.

  It was a great surprise, then, when Dmitri came out of the restaurant carrying—along with a liter of vodka and a bottle of red wine—an envelope with a message for Delkoff.

  Somehow, despite Delkoff’s months of planning, and his carefully worked-out exit from Ukraine, the Americans were already a step ahead of him.

  The Americans, ingenious as they occasionally were, had already been here and managed to leave Ivan Delkoff a message.

  PART II

  THE FOURTH MOVE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Washington.

  Two days after the attack on the Russian president’s plane, anti-US protests flared up in Moscow and St. Petersburg, a reaction to the suddenly widespread belief that the CIA had supported or planned the attack on Russia’s president. Fueled by aggressive social media campaigns and unsubstantiated news stories, the protests also seemed to stir long-simmering hatreds of the United States around the world.

  Russian journalists paraded out stories about America’s past bungled attempts to kill world leaders—Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and many others—and the US’s record of killing civilians during brutal military campaigns, from Japan to Vietnam to Iraq.

  “History,” one Russian commentator noted, “is finally catching up with America’s conception of itself. It should come as no surprise that a country founded on the genocide of its Native American population wouldn’t think twice about ordering the assassination of the president of Russia if they felt threatened enough by him. Fortunately, for Russia and the world, America has finally been caught—and will at last b
e punished for its legacy of crimes.”

  Reports from Russia continued to warn that “additional US attacks” might be imminent, possibly “against civilians,” both in Russia and in “countries with Russian interests.”

  The evidence of US involvement in the downing of the presidential plane appeared to gain legitimacy on Sunday with a splashy, but sketchy, story online about a trail of emails between Dmitro Hordiyenko, the Ukrainian arms supplier, and a senior CIA officer named Gregory Dial. “The Hordiyenko Connection,” tweeters called it. The report also alleged a transfer of five million dollars to Hordiyenko from an offshore account controlled by a CIA front company.

  “The American Fall,” read the headline of a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday, playing off “Arab Spring,” a forecast some Russian academics had been predicting for years: American democracy was in trouble, the story claimed, the United States in danger of breaking into separate pieces under the ordeal of political, racial, and economic conflicts.

  The virulence of the anti-Americanism took many at home by surprise, although others seemed to welcome it. Protests tapped a current of distrust some Americans felt toward their own government. Early Monday morning, the words “USA Kills” were spray-painted on the front wall of the Lincoln Memorial. The site was closed for hours, covered behind tarps while the graffiti was blasted off. But a photo of it went viral, and the image, with the seated figure of Abraham Lincoln in the background, became a symbol for the new anti-America movement. A large, seemingly spontaneous protest errupted later that day on the National Mall.