The Plot to Kill Putin

by Max Karpov

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “No,” Delkoff said. Dmitri was right. “The answer is: yes, I can trust them.” He could trust the Americans because the Americans were not as deceitful as the Russians. The Americans were all the things that Andrei Turov said they were: superficial, arrogant, wasteful, self-absorbed. But Americans were resourceful and they had a strong sense of right and wrong that many Russians didn’t have. And when the Americans made up their minds about something, good luck.

  There was something else, too: he kind of liked this Jacob Briggs, what he could remember of him. He was a tough, unrelenting little man, not given to easy loyalties. Built like an American mailbox. A wrestler or boxer, he’d said. A man who looked at you and made you think he wanted to hurt you. But you looked again and saw he didn’t. Delkoff remembered that.

  “All right?” he said. “Tell him I want to meet. 10:15. It’ll give me time to finish.”

  “Where?”

  “You decide.”

  Dmitri shrugged. He made a suggestion: there was an old caretaker’s cottage behind an unoccupied residence twelve or thirteen kilometers north, a small inland tract. “Don’t tell him where yet,” he said. “Just have him drive in that direction. We’ll give him directions as he gets closer.”

  “The important thing,” Delkoff added, “is you need to get away from here, too, Dmitri. You hear me? You need to go on holiday for a couple of weeks. Because they’ll be coming; within a day or two, they’ll be here. You know that.”

  There was emotion in his cousin’s face, too, a faint quivering of his lower lip. The money, Delkoff’s departure. There was a lot of emotion between them that morning, and neither man was comfortable with emotion. The sun was sparkling on the English Channel as they set out twenty minutes later, as though heralding what was ahead. Delkoff carried his country’s history in his shirt pocket now. That was a good feeling; a very good feeling.

  The Russian clean-up team arrived in Paris just after 7:35 a.m. There were two men, sent to France by Anton Konkin. Both were former members of Directorate A, the special forces counterterrorism unit of the FSB. The men were now independent contractors, working for Andrei Turov’s security firm.

  They first caught sight of the old stone farmhouse at twenty-five past ten, and watched from a distance through binoculars for the next half hour. It appeared vacant then. There were no lights visible, no movement inside. No vehicles outside. But they knew from satellite surveillance that Delkoff was staying there.

  The clean-up team pulled their rental car behind the barn adjacent to the house and parked, hidden from view on the only approach road. They broke a back-door window to get inside. The house still smelled of breakfast: eggs, bacon, coffee. There were three sets of clean dishes in the kitchen sink.

  The two former FSB men walked through the house carefully, room by room, discovering suitcases in the downstairs bedrooms, clothes folded neatly in drawers and on a bed. Upstairs, they found Delkoff’s duffel bag, a computer, an empty liter bottle of Stolichnaya on its side, an old photograph of a boy who might have been his dead son.

  The men who were staying here had probably just gone into the village. They’d be back.

  The clean-up team decided to wait. They had nothing else to do. Nowhere to go. They had all the time in the world. They pulled up chairs and watched the road from two upstairs windows, smoking Russian cigarettes. There was just one road in and one road out. They would be right here waiting when Ivan Delkoff returned.

  THIRTY-ONE

  First thing in the morning. Jake Briggs had already done his workout. A hundred push-ups and a hundred sit-ups, same as every morning, followed by a dozen wind sprints alongside the water. He had showered and eaten a light breakfast. Now, at eight o’clock, he was waiting by his rental car, bag packed, ready to go.

  He’d slept for almost four hours in the rented room. Then he’d laid awake, waiting for sunrise, hearing the Channel through the open window, the seagulls, occasionally a dog barking or a car starting in the village. Thinking about holding Jamie on his knee last Friday, watching the news from Ukraine, the look in his boy’s eyes. “Tear-iss,” he’d called them.

  It was Briggs’s second night in France. There wasn’t going to be a third.

  Celeste, the woman who ran the boarding house, rose early to walk her dog. She’d brought Briggs criossants and coffee after seeing his door was open and they’d chatted for a few minutes. Celeste was a widow, a smart, attractive woman who ran the apartments with her forty-year-old son. Briggs had walked with her down to the beach and she’d shown him the flobarts, the old flat-bottomed fishing boats still used by the local men. Briggs told her he was on a business trip, driving to Paris after a sightseeing detour. He didn’t give details. She didn’t ask.

  Patience, he told himself. Turn anger into patience, weakness into strength. Briggs sometimes wrote sayings like these on scraps of paper, like homemade fortune-cookie messages. Anger was Briggs’s Achilles’ heel. The military had done its best to knock some of that out of him, but they’d never quite gotten the job done. Nor had the process of growing older done it, as it did with most people. He’d felt a raw anger this morning, knowing that Ivan Delkoff was only a few miles away; that he could go after him if he wanted. He knew from satellite photos, and his own surveillance work, where Delkoff was, just down the road from the little restaurant where his cousin went for a drink each night. Briggs had memorized the surrounding roads and the terrain of the adjoining properties.

  Delkoff’s security at the house was an unknown, though, and Briggs couldn’t risk failure. He wanted this op to be something that he could tell his son Jamie about one day. He reminded himself of the objective as he waited: get Delkoff in his car and drive him to the Paris airport. Nothing less, nothing more.

  Patience. Already patience had served him well, he reminded himself. Overnight, Martin Lindgren had sent new images by encrypted email: Delkoff at the Riga airport, and in Paris, ID’d by facial-recognition programs. Exactly what Briggs needed. But then eight o’clock came and there was no call. 8:10. 8:15. 8:25. Briggs redialed the number from the night before, and got a Russian voice recording. He walked back to the beach, to the old fishing boats lined up by the water. Morning light glowed in the dew; the sea rippled, scuffing the sand, breeze tipping the masts of anchored boats. He breathed deeply the briny air and imagined coming back here with his family someday.

  Briggs went for another run, down to the end of the pebbly beach. That’s when, finally, his phone rang: 8:44. It wasn’t Delkoff, as promised, but the gruff-sounding cousin again, Dmitri.

  “He’ll see you at 10:15,” he said, speaking French.

  Briggs sighed. “Where?”

  “Be on the road driving north, we’ll call with directions.”

  Briggs argued for earlier. But Delkoff had made up his mind. It was shortly after 10:00 when Briggs said goodbye to Celeste and set off in his rental car back up the coast into the bright morning.

  At 10:18, Dmitri called with instructions. Drive past the creek to the south of the village. There’s an old fortified church—St. Mark—and an abandoned-looking farmhouse in a valley. There’s a small wooden cottage behind it. We’ll meet you there.

  Briggs followed the instructions, watching his mirrors. He found the cottage and parked behind it, surveying the hillsides. As meeting places go, it wasn’t one he’d have chosen. Out of the way, but with wide-open sight lines. Good setting for an ambush. “Go inside,” Dmitri told him on his cell phone. “Sit at the table, and wait for us. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

  Jake Briggs walked into the little cottage holding the 9mm Glock that Martin Lindgren had arranged for him. The air inside felt stuffy. There was a fuzzy dust on the windowsills and counters. Briggs thought of his family in Virginia, the basket of apples in the laundry room, new schoolbooks, his children watching The Croods.

  Fourteen minutes later, they arrived: a black SUV pulled up in front of the cottage and parked be
side his car. Briggs watched: two big men came out. One the driver, a bodyguard in a leather jacket, the other Delkoff. Then a smaller man emerged from the passenger side. They looked like Russian gangsters to Briggs, all three of them, like Moscow hit men from the 1990s.

  The bodyguard came in first with his gun raised. Briggs set his on the table and stood. He held out his arms for a frisk. The man took Briggs’s gun and stepped back.

  The screen door opened again, and Ivan Delkoff walked in, his cousin right behind: one man huge, the other small. Delkoff was dressed in military fatigues, old boots. Briggs immediately recognized the long, too-serious face.

  “You remembered Antalya Kebab,” Delkoff said in French, showing a thin smile, his mouth flattening and becoming lipless.

  “I do.” Briggs reached for his handshake. Delkoff clasped his hand with both of his. He pointed a pistol-finger at the table, and they sat, Delkoff swinging the chair out with two fingers. His face looked to Briggs as if it hadn’t fully unfolded from sleep.

  It was 10:38 now. Briggs wanted to do this quickly, and get Delkoff out of there. They’d lost three hours already, time enough to have driven to Paris. “Nous allons en parler et parvenir à un accord,” he said. We’re going to talk and make an agreement.

  Little Dmitri stood in the doorway, his mouth open, rectangular like a slot. The other man went outside. He waited behind the SUV, smoking a cigarette.

  Briggs passed his phone to Delkoff, showing him one of the images that Lindgren had sent via encrypted email from Belarus intelligence: Delkoff walking on the platform at the Minsk railway station.

  Delkoff seemed momentarily stunned. “Turov has it too,” Briggs said.

  “How do you know?” He looked up. His eyes were watery and red-veined.

  “They know you’re here,” Briggs said, taking back the phone. “They know what plane you took from Riga. They can figure the rest of it. We need to get you out. We’ll offer immunity. But we need to go right away.”

  It was mostly bluff, but Delkoff didn’t know that. Briggs showed him the other images on his phone, letting him slide through them. The psychological parameters were set by then. It was the same principle Briggs had honed in grade school, when kids would tease him about his height. As soon as you’re able to assert yourself, size no longer matters.

  “They followed you to Minsk,” Briggs said. “Even with the false trail you left, they’ll be here by afternoon.”

  Delkoff turned to his cousin, giving him a look Dmitri couldn’t seem to read. Delkoff is hung over, Briggs suddenly realized. Jesus Christ!

  “So what do you want?” he said.

  “I want to get you out of here. In exchange for your story.” Delkoff looked over his shoulder at Dmitri again. Dmitri’s face registered nothing. “We drive to Paris, leave from there. Fly out this afternoon. We have a corporate plane set to go.”

  “To where?”

  “Washington,” Briggs said. “After that, it’s not my business. You go to a safe house and work through all the details. Give them your terms. Whatever you want. Candidly? You can probably write your own ticket at this point.”

  Delkoff folded his hands. He squinted out the window. A faint aroma of alcohol rose to Briggs’s nostrils. Delkoff was a weird guy with a lot of rough edges, he knew. A patriot, who was fighting a war in his head that no one else could see. But right now, he was also a worried man. “How do I know it isn’t a trick?”

  “Because I’m telling you it isn’t,” Briggs said. He put away the phone, acting impatient. “And because you don’t have a choice. You need our help as much as we need yours.”

  Briggs reminded himself that Delkoff was carrying precious cargo in his head. If they got out of here, this guy’s story was going to be on 60 Minutes, the front page of the New York Times, the whole deal. “We know what you did, okay?” Briggs said, trying to nudge him. “We know about Turov. This is your chance to make up for it. You’re hearing me?”

  Delkoff looked over his shoulder at his cousin again. Something about him reminded Briggs of a dictator trying to keep his composure as his regime fell apart. Delkoff nodded. “All right. We can go this afternoon.”

  “No,” Briggs said. “We go this morning—right now. You’ve been lucky so far. But luck is always a temporary condition. You hear me?”

  Delkoff’s thick chest rose and fell in the fatigues. He was silent.

  “Someday,” Briggs said, glancing out at the driver, “who knows, maybe you’ll return to Russia a hero. But right now, we need to go.” He was bluffing again, but Briggs could feel that he was connecting; Delkoff liked this sort of talk.

  “Give us an hour, then,” Delkoff said. He scooted back his chair.

  “No. Not an hour,” Briggs said.

  Delkoff scowled as both men stood, facing across the table. “I need to get my things,” he said. “Give us thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll drive with you back to the house if you have to. But we leave from there.” Delkoff wasn’t going to fight it, he knew. He might have used his physical size to intimidate Briggs or to crowd his space, but he didn’t. Briggs’s authority had a sobering effect on him. Delkoff walked outside to discuss it with his cousin. Briggs could hear them speaking in Russian. The screen door squeaked as he came back in. Delkoff handed Briggs back his gun.

  “All right,” he said. “Follow right behind.”

  That was how they did it—Jake Briggs following the SUV back down the coast to the winding gravel roads that ended at the house. It was a lovely morning, turning warm and nearly clear, just a slight breeze; a nice day for a drive to Paris.

  Except something about it didn’t feel right to Briggs. He just had a feeling, a sense that there was going to be a problem.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Briggs went through a mental checklist as he followed Delkoff back to the house: the rental car was filled with gas; he had a micro-cassette recorder, four bottles of water, his cell phone, and a mobile Wi-Fi device; his personal belongings sat on the back seat in a carry-on. Briggs planned to record his conversation with Delkoff as he drove him to Paris. It was two-and-a-half hours to the airport. Plenty of time—more than enough—to get what Christopher needed.

  The wild card, Briggs figured, was that Delkoff had been drinking. From his dossier, he knew that Ivan Delkoff had once had a debilitating drinking problem. Drinking made him unreliable, paranoid, self-destructive. It was the reason they’d lost three hours.

  The vehicles spread out through the open expanse of country, tall wild grasses on either side of the road for a while. Briggs watched the sea and the red roofs of the little village to his left. He knew this road well, knew where it dipped and where it branched away. He’d driven it the night before with his lights out, several times, stopping to survey the house through his binoculars.

  They turned due east again, toward the stone farmhouse. Two minutes later he saw the SUV slowing down. Brakes pumping. He thought at first they were just waiting for him to catch up. But then the brakes stayed lit and the SUV stopped.

  Briggs pumped his brakes, reaching for the gun as he slowed. Why the fuck are you stopping? The house was still almost a quarter mile away.

  As he eased to a stop behind the SUV he saw the security man talking with Dmitri in front. And Dmitri turning to Delkoff in back. Something was going on.

  After a long interval, Delkoff came out of the passenger side. Then Dmitri. Both glanced toward the house, at something Briggs couldn’t see. They walked around the vehicle and stood talking, the engine still running, Delkoff a foot and a half taller than his cousin.

  Dmitri got back in the car and Delkoff began to walk down the road to Briggs, crunching in his heavy rhythm on the gravel. What the fuck? So maybe this was some kind of trick, after all.

  He lowered his window as Delkoff approached.

  “What’s going on?” Briggs lifted his gun so Delkoff could see it. Delkoff held up the palm of his left hand as if to push it away. His other hand was a fist.

&
nbsp; Delkoff leaned closer, his eyes moist. “I’m going to the house to try to work things out,” he said, in a measured tone. “You need to drive back toward the village.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re going to meet you in the clearing at the end of the road.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  But he saw something new in Delkoff’s face, and suddenly understood. Delkoff pushed something into Briggs’s shirt pocket, a small, rectangular object, and withdrew his hand. “I need to make sure everyone’s been taken care of before we go,” he said. “All right? I don’t want you coming to the house. I don’t want you coming any closer than this. You understand?”

  Briggs studied his face. “What’s this?” he said, touching his pocket.

  “That’s what I want you to have,” he said. “It’s my Declaration. All right? Go ahead, get out of here.”

  Delkoff stepped back. He began to walk to the SUV. Briggs’s first thought was to go after him. But his instincts stopped him: do as Delkoff instructed. There was a warning in his face and in his manner, the way an animal communicates an urgency. Briggs got that.

  Delkoff looked back only once: he stopped and said something to Briggs in Russian. Smiling.

  Briggs backed up his rental car and turned around; he drove to the rise in the road, where he stopped and parked, then pulled his binoculars from their case. Twice he scanned the hills, but saw nothing unusual. Then he focused on the SUV, continuing down the road to the house. Stopping by the front doors.

  Briggs watched the security man step out from the driver’s side with a Glock in his right hand. Then the cousin, Dmitri, getting out in front.

  And finally Delkoff, his six-and-a-half-foot frame unfolding from the passenger side. Walking around the car with that now-familiar sense of purpose, following the other two men.

  It was maybe thirteen steps from the car to the front of the house. Delkoff made it six. Briggs watched the dip in his stride, the look of confusion slackening his face.