The Plot to Kill Putin

by Max Karpov

  He read through the Delkoff document again, considering the scenario it detailed about what had led up to August 13. Remembering what Roger Yorke had said Thursday, after 9:15’s third call: “I wonder if her agenda may be the real story rather than what she told you.”

  He called David Carpenter back. “I need you to try something for me, if you can. I need you to run a search on somebody else.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Jon told him what he was thinking. Afterward, he walked to the window, sipping coffee. Letting this new idea spool out in his head for a while longer. He watched the news as he ate a bowl of Raisin Bran. There was breaking news—real breaking news—on all the networks, just as Roger had said: photos from the meeting last month in Kiev, with “senior CIA operative” Gregory Dial and two of the August 13 “co-conspirators,” Mikhail Kolchak and Ivan Delkoff.

  Delkoff was now being called the attack’s “ringleader.”

  The photos had been released through a WikiLeaks-style website called InternationalEthicsWatch. There was also a rough audio from the meeting, on which Dial purportedly said, “We want this to happen, but can’t be connected in any way.” Jon listened to it several times and couldn’t make out anything except the word “connected.”

  “Is this the smoking gun proving that the United States was involved in the assassination attempt?” asked the CNN newscaster. “So far, there has been no formal response from the White House, although one senior official is questioning the authenticity of the tape, calling the story a ‘diversion.’”

  On Fox, he saw that Russia was running snap drills with twenty thousand troops on the Ukrainian border right now; meanwhile, the Russian foreign minister had announced plans to meet with the president of Ukraine. “Sources say a resolution may be under discussion which could eventually result in a partition of Ukraine,” said the Fox newsreader. “But the State Department calls the story ‘completely unfounded.’”

  Jon took a shower, anxious about the fragmented, confusing way the news was playing out, but energized by his new idea. If we don’t respond properly, the lie wins. Russia wins. He was in the kitchen running his own searches again when David Carpenter called back. “Okay,” he said. “You were right.”

  “You confirmed it?”

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “Can you email me what you found?”

  “I just did. How did you know?”

  Jon listened to David’s breathing. “I don’t know how much your mother told you—”

  “I know what’s going on,” he interjected, a slight tremor in his tone. “But as I told her last night: we need to prove the real story, not just disprove the false one. Especially with this threat of war. Everything else is just a sideshow.”

  “Okay. I agree.”

  “I found more on Ketchler, too,” David said. “His businesses do have a presence on the dark web. No question. Some of these foundations are using an overlay network—which is an anonymous network within a network, basically—”

  “Okay,” Jon said, no longer following. “I want to hear more about that. But I need to check on something else first.”

  David went silent for a moment. “I’ll be here if you need anything else,” he said.

  As soon as he hung up, Jon called David’s mother.

  “I think I just figured something out,” he said. “Can we meet?”

  “Okay. But it’ll have to wait a couple hours. I’m about to go into a meeting.”

  Jon said nothing at first, feeling a surge of impatience. He had to remind himself that he was talking to a US Senator. “Okay. A couple of hours would be fine. Sure.”

  Anna asked, “What did you figure out?”

  “I think, maybe, everything?” Jon said.

  FORTY-SIX

  Northwest of Moscow.

  It was still raining heavily as Anton drove into the gated neighborhood, the Mercedes’s wipers whipping furiously side to side. Rain felt like the wrong accompaniment to this afternoon, Andrei Turov thought, although it fit nicely with the music inside their sedan, which was Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony: the stormy, emotional melodies his mother used to listen to when he was a boy. Turov had hoped to say goodbye to his country home in the sunlight. But many things were beyond his control now.

  Much of the world believed that the US government had been the invisible hand behind August 13, a perception that earned Russia enormous empathy capital. The latest revelations were being characterized internationally as “the smoking gun.” Which was good. Just that phrase, repeated by Turov’s bot armies and political operatives on social media, would cause enormous damage, much as the phrase “assassination committee” had done. Soon, Washington would revert to full panic mode, and eventually make some rash overcompensation, only worsening their position.

  Yes, Russia would surely benefit from this. But Turov’s old friend, he feared, was only going to squander it, thinking that he could outplay history somehow. Going back to their schooldays in Leningrad, Putin had been a gambler: if he took a risk and won, then his next move was to take a bigger risk. It had worked for him so far. But it was not the way to build a legacy. In truth, his old friend was not really a nationalist as he pretended to be; he was a gambler and a kleptocrat, as his critics charged. Turov did not want to be around him when he finally lost.

  In Switzerland, Turov would have a spectacular view from his office window, of enormous white mountaintops. There—and wherever he traveled next—he would nurture new dreams, surrounded by his family, by Olga, Konkin, and a few associates.

  They parked in the two-car garage at the house Anton had rented. Turov had never been to this one before, and it was a little larger and more modern than he liked. But otherwise it felt like the dozens of other dwellings he’d used for his client meetings, designer-furnished properties rented or purchased for him by Konkin. Even though Russia as a whole was losing population every year, Moscow itself was growing and decentralizing, expanding into hundreds of gated villages and residential developments such as this one.

  In the plush corner office, replete with dark woods, leather, and brass, Turov unpacked his briefcase: a cell phone, a laptop, a writing tablet and gold pen, three classical CDs, and a Makarov 9mm handgun, which he set in the upper middle drawer of the desk. He was going to keep this meeting with the American as simple as possible.

  Anton put on Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony in the house, too, and Turov sat and listened for a while, to the music and the rain, the melodrama of his mother’s beloved melodies—the first and second movements, in particular, music that had seemed to make up for the lack of drama in her own life.

  Turov needed just one more thing now: his collaborator. And the collaborator was coming right here to this room. He was scheduled to arrive by 3:30 p.m. The American, Christopher Niles. Then Turov could finish this game on his own terms.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Capitol Hill, Washington.

  Anna Carpenter was supposed to meet Jon Niles at eleven, in Starbucks again. But it was a hectic morning and she was running late. She’d attended a 9:30 intelligence briefing on Russia’s military buildup, learning that a series of cyber attacks had just crippled parts of Ukraine and Estonia, crashing military, police, and government computer systems. But this news would be overshadowed now by the so-called “smoking gun” allegations against the US.

  It’s still moving too fast, Anna thought. Much too fast. This time, though, she was going to do something about it. Anna set goals for herself each morning during her workouts. Today’s was ambitious: to disprove the story the president planned to sell to the American people.

  She was eleven minutes late to Starbucks, where she found Jon standing just inside the doors, waiting anxiously, a ten-by-twelve envelope in one hand. “Sorry,” she said. “Meeting ran long.”

  “It’s okay. Lot going on.” He flinched in that affecting way he had, then led her to a table.

  “Did David help much?”

  “David helped
a lot. David’s kind of amazing, really.”

  “Yes, I’ve thought that. He’s helping me, too,” she said. They sat.

  Anna told him first about her conversation with Gregory Dial, and the revelation that Harland Strickland had been the fifth person on the so-called “assassination committee.” Surprisingly, Jon seemed unsurprised.

  “I’ll try to make this brief,” he said when she finished, “because I know you’re in a hurry. I think I understand now what’s going on. The document you gave me is accurate, I believe. You were right, we didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “Okay, good,” Anna said. “That makes two of us now who know it. All we have to do is convince the rest of the world.”

  “Which we’re going to do,” Jon said. The smile she expected didn’t appear. Anna liked his intensity this morning. He scrolled through a file on his phone and began to explain what he’d found: beginning with the car registration he’d traced to Michael Ketchler, a nonprofit attorney with the high-end D.C. firm of Carrick & Carson. Then he showed her the images David had sent of Ketchler. “This is the man I saw last night.”

  “With your 9:15 source.”

  “Yes. 9:15’s name is Natalie Larsen,” he said. “Sonya Natalie Larsen.” Jon slid through several images of her, showing Anna. It wasn’t anyone she recognized, or a name she knew. “David did a face recog search. It was this image, from a Russian embassy party, in 2015, that did it.”

  Anna looked. “And that’s her—the woman who called you anonymously? Who gave you this information about Russia.”

  “Yes,” Jon said. “She works for Ketchler. But David found something else, too,” he continued. “An interesting coincidence. I thought you might like to see. This is from the same embassy party. Do you recognize this man?”

  The man he’d enlarged in the next image resembled Harland Strickland. Anna looked again. “That’s Harland.”

  “Yes.”

  “So Harland Strickland was at the same party as your source? Does that mean anything?”

  “Probably, yes,” Jon said. “Didn’t you mention that Gregory Dial said something about Strickland’s personal life?”

  “Yes.” Her phone pinged and she looked quickly: Ming Hsu, calling her back to the office. “Harland’s what used to be called a ladies’ man,” Anna said. “‘Womanizer’ is probably a better word, considering he’s married. There were a few incidents in his past, where he went out for drinks with women a lot younger than he was. One a newspaper editor, I think. I don’t know that it’s anything more mysterious than that.” Jon was nodding, as if this confirmed something. “Why? Why does that matter?”

  “I think 9:15 may’ve been one of those younger women,” he said. “And I think it’s possible that she had something on him.”

  “Kompromat?”

  “Possible.”

  This made sense to Anna. Harland would be easy prey for an alluring Russian girl in her mid-twenties. Was he the spy in the house, then, if not Dial?

  “So tell me about this thing you figured out,” she said.

  “Well. First of all, I’m starting to see that it was Strickland who leaked the story to the media,” he said.

  “Strickland did?” Christopher’s little brother was as focused as a monk now. But he wasn’t making a lot of sense. “Wouldn’t Harland be the last person to leak that information?” Anna said. “Considering he’s been leading the cover story—about the coup?”

  “Unless he didn’t know he was leaking it.” Jon opened the ten-by-twelve envelope and pulled out several sheets of paper. “I asked David to dig into Natalie Larsen’s background. Sonya Natalie,” he said again. “Larsen is her married name. She came to D.C. a little over a year ago, we think, from England, where she also worked for a law firm. She apparently separated from her husband sometime before that, but they’re still legally married, or at least she kept his name. Her husband was an environmental attorney. The interesting thing—and this is where I began to make a little leap—is that David found out her maiden name was Fedorov. She’s Russian, not English.”

  “Interesting because—?”

  “Fedorov also happened to be the maiden name of Andrei Turov’s wife. Ex-wife.”

  “So—you’re saying she’s related to Turov.”

  “Yes. I think it’s his daughter, in fact,” he said. “That’s what David and I figured out. Turov has two daughters. One lives with him in Moscow. Her name’s Svetlana. Sonya is the older daughter. She’s more of a free spirit, kind of a thorn in her father’s side for years. After the divorce, she went to live with her mother in England, took her mother’s last name, and became a citizen of the U.K. After that, she seems to have dropped off the map.”

  Anna was amazed by this turn and that he’d come to it so quickly. But she wondered how it pertained to what was going on in Russia. “What happened to the mother?”

  “She died in 2014. An alcohol-related traffic accident in England. There are some accounts online saying that both mother and daughter died. But David thinks she may have planted those herself.”

  Anna nodded for him to continue. She’d seen this same keenness in other journalists, once they’d gotten the scent of a story. But Jon seemed to have more than just the scent. He seemed to know exactly where this was leading. “And how does Harland figure?”

  “So I called David back,” he said. “Asked him to run searches on Sonya Turov. And we hit a few bingos. Including Harland Strickland. It doesn’t mean she’s some kind of high-level spy or anything. She might just be a smart, self-sufficient woman who was able to get Strickland to talk—”

  “But you’re thinking Strickland told Turov’s daughter—your 9:15 source—about the preemptive strike, and the ‘no fingerprints’ talk, in the course of a fling? Pillow talk? That he inadvertently leaked details about those meetings through her?”

  “Or that she managed to pry it out of him,” Jon said.

  “And now Strickland’s pushing this story about the Russian coup because he’s trying to cover, to change the subject? To divert attention from the fact that he may’ve been talking about classified information? Or that there may be some sort of tape or other compromising evidence against him.”

  Jon nodded. “With a woman who happens to be the daughter of the organizer of the attack.”

  “Do you think he knew that?”

  “He probably didn’t at first. But I suspect he’s figured it out by now. Obviously, the truth could be very personally damaging to Strickland. He’s in damage control mode and he’s pulling a lot of people—maybe the country—down with him.”

  It was sort of stunning, Anna thought, and said a lot about our times: that a sexual imbroglio could lead to war or threaten the fall of a great nation. “How’d you get all this? How did you figure the connection between Strickland and this woman?”

  “After we got 9:15’s maiden name, I made the Turov connection. I’d always thought 9:15 was someone older, who had some link, however tangentially, with the administration. But when I saw her on the street, and I saw how young she was, I realized I needed to rethink that.”

  “How did you connect her with Strickland, though? Just through the photo?”

  “No. There was one other thing,” Jon said. “A number. Something Strickland told me about national security meetings: he said eighty-five percent of national security meetings in the past year have been about the Middle East, not Russia.”

  “So?”

  “So, those were the exact same words that my 9:15 source used when we talked last Thursday. And it’s not a number anyone else seems to be using. So when Strickland told me the same thing—almost word for word—I realized she had been talking with him.”

  Anna remembered something, then: Martin Lindgren mentioning to Christopher that he had a Russian “asset.” Was it possible this Natalie Larsen could be the asset?

  “And why was she calling you, in the first place?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Jon said. “I don’t t
hink I was the only journalist getting calls. Maybe she was doing this for her father, or more likely for this Michael Ketchler. That’s still to be determined,” he added. “I think we have to go full-court press now. We can’t let what is essentially a sideshow derail our country.”

  “Sideshow.”

  “David’s word. I think he’s right. Our country has become good at turning sideshows into main events. Sacrificing big things that matter for little ones that don’t.” Jon clicked his pen anxiously.

  “So what are you going to do with this?” she said. “What’s your plan?”

  Jon shrugged. “Talk with Sonya. I have a call in to her. I think I’m going to just go find her if I don’t hear back. But I wanted to know what you think,” he said. “Since we’re working on this together.”

  Anna sighed. “What I think,” she said, “is that you should talk with her. But I also think you should wait.”

  “Why wait?” Jon said.

  “You asked me the first time we spoke if this had anything to do with your brother,” she said. “It does. Christopher has put together a very small team of people who are looking at Russia in a slightly unorthodox fashion. Without going into all of the specifics, I sort of recruited you for that team.” Jon’s face went blank, as if this didn’t surprise him. “I took it upon myself to do that. I just never got around to telling you.” She smiled. “But, as your brother sometimes says, the weakest point in the intelligence community is information-sharing. Or lack of it. I wonder if you could share what you just told me with someone else.”

  “I could. I guess,” Jon said.

  Anna called Ming as they walked out together. “Will you cancel all my appointments this afternoon?” she said.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  CIA headquarters. Langley, Virginia.

  On the thirty-five-minute drive from Capitol Hill to Langley, they filled gaps in each other’s understandings about what had happened on August 13. Jon explained to Anna the rest of his theory about Sonya Turov and Harland Strickland. Anna told him more of what she’d learned from Gregory Dial; and they traded what they knew about General Utkin and the supposed “coup” plot.