The Plot to Kill Putin

by Max Karpov

“He was a key figure in the Donbas war,” Anna said. “And a man people underestimated. He had a whole network of fighters in eastern Ukraine who could have made August 13 happen.”

  “Not without Utkin and the generals,” Strickland said.

  “That’s where we disagree. This wasn’t a coup attempt, Harland. It was something more sinister. It was an attack on us. I think on some level you know that.”

  Strickland sighed, holding up his hands in a deflective posture. “Look, I hate to state the obvious here, Anna. But the world doesn’t believe this Delkoff story. You know that. We can’t just wave a magic wand and change that.”

  Yes, we can, she thought. “You have influence with the president I don’t have,” she said, feeling a stir of emotion. “And with the DNI and DCI. You could talk to the president before he goes on television tomorrow. Tell him you have doubts about this intelligence. Tell him we need to do more than just ‘change the story.’”

  “Come on,” Strickland said. Which seemed to Anna a good cue to show what her son had found. She scrolled through the images on her phone, coming to the one of Sonya Natalie Larsen at the Russian embassy party. She pushed it in front of him.

  Strickland lifted the phone and studied Sonya’s picture. He exaggerated a frown, looked again, and replaced it on the table.

  “How long did it take, Harland, before you realized she was getting information from you and slipping it to the media?” Strickland said nothing, and Anna knew for certain then that Jon was right: it was Strickland helping the Russians; he was the spy in the house. “When you brought me that story about preemptive action last week, you must’ve been sweating this. You did a good job of not letting on. Is this whole coup story an attempt to cover up now for Sonya? To keep the press from finding out that this story really came from you? Through her?”

  Strickland’s eyes seemed to be searching for somewhere to look now. Anna sensed the hurt and confusion behind them. Sonya Turov had used him, preying on Strickland’s weaknesses, much as Russia had done with the United States.

  “I mean, I would hope we’re not putting the country’s reputation on pins and needles because of Harland Strickland’s love life,” she said. “Or is there more to it than that?”

  “Love life?” He tossed back his head in a mock laugh. “Please,” he said. His response struck her as false this time. In a funny way, he’d just shown his hand. And they both knew it.

  “That’s what it sounds like,” she said. “It sounds like you were seeing this woman for several months, and along the way, she got you to talk about things that you shouldn’t have—in some cases involving these meetings on Russia. Maybe not a lot, but enough for her to know that there’d been this discussion of preemptive action.”

  “Hypothetical discussion,” Strickland said. “It was discussed hypothetically.”

  “And then, when some of these stories began to leak to the media,” Anna said, “you became worried that it might come back to bite you. Because this was classified information and only a few people knew about the meetings.” She paused for effect. “I can see how it evolved. Russia takes a tiny thread of truth—that there was talk about a preemptive strike—and spins it into an elaborate fiction, using all the resources of social media. Then fits it to their larger plan, which included the meeting in Kiev. Which I understand they set up, not you.”

  “Of course.”

  “Meanwhile, as you say, the infighting in Washington has prevented us from responding properly. So a small group in the administration decides to push an alternate story. Thinking that if the president takes it to the nation, giving it his stamp, the preemptive strike story may go away. But that’s just what Russia wants us to do. You’re doing their work for them. Sometimes consensus is more dangerous than dissension, Harland.

  “They’ll say the story is a cover-up, and they’ll be right. But you’re not covering up a plot to assassinate Russia’s president, as they’ll charge. You’re covering up your own personal indiscretion. It’s a Washington sideshow.” Anna felt a momenatary tingle of pride, quoting her son. “You could save us a lot of trouble by simply ending it.”

  “Come on.” He exhaled a lengthy sigh. “It’s not that simple. You know that.”

  “We could make it that simple. I’ll help.”

  Strickland gazed toward the street. She knew what he was thinking. This was his life now. He understood that Anna was sitting on a story that could damage him personally, irreparably. A story that could wind up as a sentence or two in his obituary. Maybe the lead sentence. But it was also a story that could be made to disappear. That’s what she was offering him. “How long have you known this?”

  “Not long. I’m sorry, Harland, I didn’t want to do it like this. But you kind of brought it on. You insisted to journalists—and me—that those meetings never happened. You denied having had contact with Hordiyenko.”

  “You know I couldn’t talk about any of that. Legally, I couldn’t say a word.”

  “But you did talk about it. You told us those conversations didn’t happen. When in fact you called this committee together and you discussed preemptive action.”

  “Hypothetically. It was discussed hypothetically.”

  “Yes, I know,” Anna said. “But you said it was never discussed.”

  He drew out a sigh. “You know what the media does with this stuff, Anna. Sometimes it’s okay to cover your ass. And also, I thought— frankly—that it was possible I was being set up.”

  Anna didn’t know if he really believed that or was saying it to draw empathy. Or shut her up. At this point, it didn’t matter.

  “What do you want me to do?” he said.

  “Talk to the president. Tell him the truth. Tell the DNI. Call them tonight. You’ll also be helping yourself. We need you on board.”

  “We?”

  “Me. I need you on board.” He frowned, the skin wrinkling around his eyes and cheeks. “The intel on this Russian general isn’t going to check out,” she said. “The media will tear it apart if it goes out. Let’s cut it off now before it becomes a national humiliation.”

  Harland seemed more interested in his drink again, his hands cradling the glass. But Anna knew she’d reached him. She took back her phone and put it in her purse.

  “Okay,” he said at last, looking up as if admitting to a minor error. Then he reached out and put his hand on hers. Anna waited a moment and pulled her hand away. She knew from experience that when Strickland got like this he was liable to do something embarrassing.

  Strickland finished his drink. He set a twenty on the table. They both stood.

  “Need a ride?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  They walked outdoors and stood on the sidewalk, breathing the warm night air. Anna was going the way he wasn’t. Saying goodbye, he pulled her against him and he kissed her hard on the lips, a misplaced act that felt violent and sad. Anna put a hand on his chest and pushed away.

  “Let me see what I can do,” he said, as if nothing strange had just happened.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Hilton Hotel. Washington.

  To tell you the truth, I think I’m in trouble,” Sonya Larsen said, absently swirling a glass of merlot in her right hand. “I’m worried about Michael. But I’m more worried about myself. Especially after today, after you called me. I’m afraid someone’s going to be hurt.”

  “Michael’s your boss.”

  “Yeah.” Her black eyes studied him, roaming his face from his lips to his eyes and back as if he were some species she hadn’t seen before. He wondered how much she really knew about him. They were seated four feet apart on the ninth floor of the Washington Hilton, Sonya on the bed, Jon on the desk chair. She was willing to talk, she said, to tell him “the real story,” but she didn’t want to be quoted. Jon was hoping the ground rules might change slightly after a glass or two of wine.

  “Where do you want me to start?” she said.

  “How about with Michael. Who is he?”
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br />   “I don’t know how much of that I really want to go into—” Her eyes turned to Jon again, roving his features like a slow camera. “I work for Michael. He works for my father, indirectly. But I’m not supposed to know that. Michael represents nonprofits, basically, throughout the country. My father helped me get the job,” she said, speaking with a slight accent—shortening her vowels, a faint v sound at the start of “work.”

  “Whose idea was it for you to contact the media, to spread this story?” he said.

  “Michael’s. I only did it because I thought the story I told you was true. Both of our countries have conspiracies,” she said. “The difference is, yours become known, ours don’t.” She smiled at that, lamplight glinting on her white teeth as she turned her head. It was a line she’d heard someone else say, Jon could tell.

  “So what happened last week? Did you have any idea this was coming?” he said. “I got the sense from your call on Thursday that you did.”

  “You mean the plane? No, of course not. I mean, I knew something was coming. I’d heard the government was planning something against Russia. And Putin.”

  “That’s why you called me.”

  “That’s why I called anyone. Of course.”

  “And you knew this how? Because of what Harland Strickland told you?”

  “In part.” She glanced out at the city and took another drink of wine. They’d bought a bottle at the bar downstairs and Sonya had just poured her second glass. Jon was still nursing his first. “There were others. But I took pieces of the story from him and put it out there, yeah. It was sort of fun for a while.”

  “How did you choose Harland Strickland? Or anyone? Who put you on to these people?”

  “Michael did.” She looked at him, her face very young all of a sudden. “They had a list of people, at various levels of government, CIA or Defense or wherever, that they believed could be accessed. That’s part of the business. They compile lists of people and their weaknesses. People who drink too much, or have a gambling problem. Or the honeypot, as they call it. People vulnerable to kompromat. And sometimes I was hired to help exploit that. Get people to talk.”

  “Like Strickland.”

  “Yeah.” She turned her eyes to him, her lips darkened with wine. “His weakness is that he likes to feel important. He likes people to talk to him like he’s important. And he also likes young girls.” She looked down and smiled quickly.

  “And what did Strickland tell you, exactly?”

  “Not much. No more than a few sentences that were worth anything.”

  “Tell me.”

  She shrugged. “Just—we’d be talking about Russia, or Putin, and he would say something like, ‘And what if it was possible for us to eliminate that problem?’ And I’d make a stupid face and ask a couple of questions and store it all away. I think I may’ve eventually freaked him out a little with my questions. In the end, he cut me off cold turkey.”

  “When was this?”

  “A week ago? Ten days.”

  “And then the plane happened,” Jon said. “You say you had no idea ahead of time?”

  “Of course not.” He noticed the shadow of hair across her upper lip as she turned her head. “But then when I saw what happened, and I saw your country was being blamed, my first thought was, ‘So, they were right. The US really did this.’ And at the same time, I felt guilty.”

  “Why guilty?” Jon said.

  “Because. I knew something was coming and I hadn’t been able to stop it. Of course, it took another few hours before I found out the truth. And then I realized I’d been duped.”

  “How?”

  She looked at her wine, formulating a reply. “Until then I believed that the United States, or some group in the government, or the military, really was planning to eliminate Putin. Michael was egging me on a little with that, making me believe it. So when I found out he was alive, I freaked out. Because there were a couple of remarks Michael made that were very suspicious in hindsight. And then eventually it all came together. And I thought: of course they knew about it. They knew about it because they had planned it.”

  “‘They’ being your father? And Michael?”

  She nodded, keeping her eyes down.

  “You need to talk to someone,” Jon said, feeling responsible for her all of a sudden. “You need to make a request for immunity.”

  “I know I do.” She held her wine glass in both hands. “Why do you think I’m talking with you? Are you going to help me?”

  “I will, yes.”

  Jon tried to remember Roger Yorke’s phone number. But he wanted to hear the rest of her story first.

  “So you believe now that your father was involved? That he may’ve planned the attack, as these reports are saying—”

  “Helped plan it. Yeah, I do.”

  “And you believe the Russian president was also involved?”

  She made a face. “If not, there’s no reason my father would’ve done it,” she said, a catch in her voice. “But I’ll tell you the thing I’m afraid of. It’s that my father gets blamed for all this and the little monster gets away again. My father, he used to say, ‘little thieves are hanged, the great ones escape.’ I used to think that maybe he was a great one. He acted like it. But he wasn’t; he just worked for one.” She took a long drink. The glass made a louder-than-expected thunk on the wooden table. “You know, my mother used to say, ‘Why does your father make things so difficult for himself?’ We never knew. I think it goes back to his own family. His father left when he was three or four years old and he was always looking for authority figures. And Putin became kind of a father figure to him. The biggest authority figure in the world, right?”

  “So tell me the real story,” Jon said, pivoting to what she’d told him on the drive downtown. “You said there was a ‘real’ story you could share.”

  “Yeah. There is.” She gave him a lingering look. “There was this thing my father used to say, going back, about the ‘catalyst.’ That’s what he called it. ‘All it takes is a catalyst.’ A match to light a fuse and the United States will go up in flames, same as the Soviet Union did in 1991. The US is just as vulnerable, even if they don’t know it yet. They talk about that a lot in Russia now, you know, the so-called political theorists. They talk about the breakup of the United States and the resurgence of Russia as if they’re the same thing.”

  “Strategic relativism,” Jon said.

  “Yeah, right.” A flicker of recognition crossed her face. “Anyway, the catalyst sets off a chain reaction. But first you have to create a pathway. That’s Michael’s business, basically. That’s what his mission is here: creating the pathway. I’m not supposed to know that, of course,” she said. “But you spend enough time around someone, you figure things out.”

  “Michael works with nonprofits, you said.”

  “He helps coordinate a whole network, yeah, that’s what he came here for. Nonprofits, think tanks, media companies, charities, political action groups. Influence operations, basically. My father used to say, ‘America is sleeping. Anyone can walk in the house now and take whatever they want. Even the ownership deed.’ It’s the weakness of an open society.”

  “The ultimate purpose of this infiltration being what, then?” Jon said. “To break the country apart?”

  “I guess. I don’t really know the ultimate purpose.” She lifted her glass and pointed it at the blank television screen; the color of her fingernails was slightly darker than the wine. “Secession is in the news now in Texas, right? But it’s set up to go in other states, too. If you want to break up the United States, do it from within. Disrupt their culture; create racial, social, and political unrest. But let their own people do it. Make them think things are bad and soon they will be. That was one of my father’s big ideas.

  “And in some cases, of course, there are organizations already doing it,” she went on. “Ready-made fringe groups, Michael calls them. Like some of these so-called patriot groups that want to destabili
ze the government. They’ve done the same thing in Europe.”

  “So August 13 was a catalyst for that. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “I think so.” She took a sip of wine and set her glass down. “You know, when I was little, my father taught me a certain kind of chess that you could win in four moves. But he warned me: it only works with players who don’t know the game.”

  “And the United States doesn’t know this game. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Sonya shrug-nodded.

  “How much of this can I write?” he said.

  “It doesn’t really matter. I don’t care that much about your story, to be honest. I care about what’s going to happen to me.”

  “All right. Let’s make the call.”

  Jon had left his cell phone in his car, he remembered. So he used the room phone instead, as Sonya stood and walked to the window, taking in the view of the city. He reached Roger Yorke at his home, hoping no one was listening in on them. “Stay with Sonya,” Roger instructed him, and he would contact the federal marshals program. Ten minutes later he called back to say that a federal agent was on his way to the Hilton. Roger, too, would be down, to give Jon a ride home.

  He wondered for a while if Sonya might change her mind in the interim. If she’d be tempted to return to the familiarity of her life in Washington with Michael Ketchler. But he could see she was already past that. Whatever secrets and self-consciousness she had carried into this hotel room fell away and she talked with an expanding energy and confidence, telling Jon about her upbringing, her parents, her younger sister Svetlana, her mother’s death in England, her brief, troubled marriage to Edward Larsen, and the odyssey that had brought her to Washington. Her resolve only seemed to harden as they talked, and he understood why she had brought him here: this room was her escape hatch to a new life. Jon listened, prodding her slightly with questions while becoming lost several times in the dark intensity of her eyes— imagining the places they’d been, the people they’d seen.

  When the conversation ended with a knock on the door, it felt to Jon like coming awake from an interesting dream and knowing he could never enter it again. Talking with Roger in the elevator, he was already struggling to remember some of what Sonya had said. But he walked out of the hotel that night with something he didn’t have going in.