The Kremlin's Candidate

by Jason Matthews

  The relationship between agent and masters matured. As MAGNIT’s performance continued unabated, and her reliability ratings remained at the highest level—all services constantly assess their canaries, for the first sign of trouble in a case is an anomalous change in intel production—Gorelikov, at Putin’s direction, began parallel handling: GRU officers handled MAGNIT inside the United States, although they were little more than mailmen, collecting drops and passing requirements. Gorelikov, however, began meeting MAGNIT during her annual personal leave, her one break from her otherwise total devotion to the laboratories, Special Access Programs, personnel management, and budget-oversight duties that consumed her. Everyone knew that stork-like Admiral Rowland chose rugged campestral destinations for her solo monthlong holiday travels: hiking in Nepal; photo safaris in Tanzania; camping in Jamaica; or kayaking down the Amazon. To colleagues unaccustomed to seeing rawboned Audrey Rowland in anything but her uniform, vacation photos of her in hiking shorts, boots, cargo pants, or a wet suit usually raised eyebrows and occasioned muttered comparisons to Ichabod Crane.

  Meetings with Anton were arranged on the margins of Audrey’s exotic vacations, in luxurious rented houses in the nearest large cities to avoid extra travel and incriminating stamps in her passport. The agent’s initial, delusional rationalization for spying evolved under the philosophical tutelage of Uncle Anton, who sought to keep Audrey motivated. The notion of “level playing fields” seemed less relevant in the New Cold War of active measures and cyberoperations. Anton instead often raised the inequity of the system for women in the navy, drawing from Audrey’s progressively less-guarded comments about a childhood clearly and completely dominated by an overbearing father, a rakish naval aviator who cowed his quiescent wife and as much as told Audrey he would have preferred a son. If her father were alive today, Audrey told Anton, he would have to salute her. Anton agreed that women had the same problem in Russia: forced by society, customs, and institutions to let men steal emotional strength away from them. Anton’s wry empathy struck a chord in Audrey. What she was doing—passing secrets, meeting furtively, accepting payment from the Kremlin—she was doing for herself, and she was doing it to excel in her career despite the men, despite the system. The growing balance in her Center-managed accounts—she already had five million dollars’ worth of the Kremlin’s euros, Krugerrands, and uncut diamonds—was further personal validation that this was due her.

  Anton recognized that the notion of espionage as an engine of Audrey’s emancipation was a potent control factor. Additional control naturally came from her sexual appetites. Despite liberalizations in the US armed forces, Anton continually harped on the necessity of keeping her predilection for female lovers a secret lest she derail her career. The closeted world that Audrey inhabited kept her in an itchy state and made her a better agent: nervy, edgy, and resentful. Her annual vacations abroad were delicious opportunities to spot, pursue, and bed tantalizing lovers. Anton several times had to intercede with local authorities when sessions with Audrey and a local partner became too spirited—Audrey on the boil occasionally became physical. Anton even arranged for forged-alias identity cards to keep her true name out of local police blotters if things got out of control. The sex was a handling problem, but it was worth the bother as a tool to control MAGNIT, for when she was back in Washington behind her desk at ONR, the Office of Naval Research, broad stripes on her sleeves and three stars on her collar, she was by necessity benignly celibate, and had to live the part.

  Anton even advised her to eschew battery-operated boyfriends at home because she was assigned a live-in navy steward and cook in the gabled Victorian Quarters B on Admiral’s Row at the Washington Naval Yard in SE Washington. He sternly told her that her snow-white image as a laudably asexual professional would be sullied if her staff found any sex toys, and rumors would quickly circulate about the wild-haired, three-star stoker in the attic at midnight with a 220 V massager making the lights flicker and scaring the mice. The same applied when Audrey one year discovered spicy Thai cucumber salad while on a temple tour in northern Thailand, and announced she would have her cook in Washington prepare it often. During their meeting in the swanky Anantara Resort in provincial Chiang Mai, Anton sternly told her to leave the contents of the reefer crisper alone; the household staff would be bound to notice missing cucumbers. Audrey laughed at the image. After so many years, Uncle Anton could talk to her about such things freely.

  Between her sustaining foreign meetings with Uncle Anton, MAGNIT met once a month in Washington with GRU handlers who were military intel officers from the Russian Embassy on Wisconsin Avenue. Covered as run-of-the-mill military attachés, GRU spooks rarely ran true clandestine sources, inhabiting instead the margins of classic intelligence of elicitation, open-source collection, and technology transfer. The meetings were held in suburban parks and along nature trails and greenswards in Washington and suburban Maryland and Virginia. These meetings were little more than five-minute brief encounters during which Audrey would pass her intel and send messages to Uncle Anton. Audrey’s quantitative mind took to the challenge of finding imaginative meeting sites, ones that she could surveil from a distance to ensure the GRU dolt-of-the-month hadn’t dragged FBI surveillance with him. Audrey had discussed the fine points of site casing with Anton—her tutor in so many things—and had become quite adept. Audrey had lost count of the endless discs, thumb drives, digital cameras, hard drives, and, occasionally, sheaves of physical documents, bound volumes, and printouts on every aspect of naval-weapons research, antisubmarine warfare, ship design and radar, stealth technology, and encrypted communications she dumped in the laps of her handlers. After twelve years in harness, she couldn’t have accurately listed the sum total of the secrets she had passed the Russians. She really didn’t care. The three stripes on her uniform coat were reason enough to continue.

  A source such as MAGNIT unquestionably was the jewel in the GRU crown, as well as a constant burden on the collective abilities of GRU Headquarters, commonly known as the Aquarium. From the beginning, Anton Gorelikov had been secretly assigned by Putin to monitor the MAGNIT case, and observe the quality and durability of GRU tradecraft. When MAGNIT received her third star, Gorelikov none-too-gently began prying the case away from the military, eventually to be assigned to an illegals officer in New York who would be anonymous, invisible, and inviolate. At that time, the MAGNIT cryptonym would be changed and the files tightly restricted. Gorelikov also had his eye on SVR Chief of Counterintelligence Colonel Egorova, who he thought eventually could share MAGNIT handling duties abroad, based on her previous experience in street operations and counterintelligence.

  President Putin had for years been on a low simmer for his counterintelligence chief, the former busty ballerina, since the night he had visited Dominika’s room in the Constantine Palace at midnight and casually fondled the lace bodice of her nightgown while ordering her to fly to Paris and eradicate her chief, the psychopath Zyuganov, who had gotten on Putin’s bad side. The president had not forgotten how Egorova’s nipples had responded to his touch, could not forget the faint scratching of the dockyard rivets swelling beneath the lace, and how her lashes fluttered in coy arousal. He would own her eventually, it was inevitable. He had intentions of promoting Egorova in the near future, but not yet. And handling MAGNIT could wait: the mole’s continued production was critical. Gorelikov assured Putin this was just the beginning: as the US Navy would founder and disintegrate, so would the United States. “Chto bylo, to proshlo I bylyom poroslo, what used to be will be gone and overgrown with grass,” said Gorelikov to Vladimir.

  MAGNIT’S SPICY THAI CUCUMBER SALAD

  Peel and deseed cucumber and slice paper-thin, preferably on a mandolin. Put cucumber slices in a colander, sprinkle with salt, and let drain, squeezing out excess water. In a bowl, mix rice vinegar, lime juice, thin slices of garlic, lots of finely diced Thai bird’s-eye chilies, nam pla (fish sauce), chopped cilantro, a dash of sesame oil, sugar, finely diced
scallions, and thinly sliced red onion (soak onions in ice water briefly beforehand). Toss cucumbers in dressing and sprinkle with either dried shrimp powder or finely ground peanuts. Serve immediately.

  3

  You Are Mine

  Dominika uncapped the lipstick tube and wrote Ti Moy on Nathaniel Nash’s naked chest as she lay on top of him in bed in CIA’s safe house: a sun-blasted, white stucco cottage at the end of a dusty road at the top of a rocky cactus hill in Vouliagmeni, fifteen kilometers south of Athens, with a hazy view of the island of Aegina across the dead-calm turquoise Saronic Gulf. White island ferries heading into the Port of Piraeus left intersecting foaming wakes as they passed. Outside the window, hummingbirds flitted around the blossoms on the wisteria vines that grew up the outside walls of the one-room villa. Dominika hitched herself a little higher and kissed him on the lips.

  “I hope that wasn’t one of your lipstick guns,” said Nate. Two years earlier, SVR’s Line T (technical) had given Dominika two electrically fired, single-shot weapons disguised as lipstick tubes that she had used in Paris to separate the skullcap from the brainpan of her diminutive and psychotic chief Zyuganov, who at the time was raking her ribs with a stiletto, trying to shiver the tip of the blade between her ribs and into her heart. He had divined that Dominika was working for CIA, and when the exploding dumdum bullets from the lipstick guns aerosolized the poison dwarf’s brain into the river Seine, she was safe, again, for the time being, until the next crisis.

  * * *

  * * *

  That had been five years after her first overseas tour in Helsinki. Finland had been a dream. Gingerbread-trim houses, and sizzling venison cutlets, and the excitement and ecstasy of a real operational mission: to find CIA officer Nathaniel Nash of the American Embassy, meet, befriend, and, if necessary, seduce him to elicit the name of a high-ranking Russian the SVR knew, just knew, Nash was handling, but could never catch. Nash and Dominika started working on each other—dinners by the light of candle-wax-covered wine bottles, walks in leafy city parks, coffees along the breezy harbor promenade, the girls’ summer skirts billowing above their hips. Elicitation, bone throwing, verbal snares, and assessment traps. They both knew all the developmental tricks, and banged heads for three months, trying to recruit each other. She noted that his crimson halo—passion, devotion, constancy—never wavered or rippled. He told the truth and she could see his interest deepening by the day.

  Then the impossible happened. Nate’s easy, honest nature; his mild—but accurate—criticism of the current mess in Russia; the earnest, flirty attention he paid to her made her question what she was doing, for whom she was doing it, and why. When her friend in the Russian Embassy disappeared (Dominika was positive she had been assassinated over a minor infraction of security), it pushed her over the edge. On a rainy Helsinki night, she accepted Nate’s recruitment pitch to spy for CIA, and she was encrypted DIVA. How better could she do maximum damage to the tsar and his bandits? What more could she do to feed the otvrashcheniye, the loathing for them she felt? By spying for CIA, Dominika was helping the Rodina, not betraying it.

  Bozhe, God, they were a different breed, these CIA men who gathered around to train her, and coach her, and support her like family, beneficence unheard of and impossible in her own SVR. A small group of them had come into her life. Chief of Europe Division, Tom Forsyth, the salt-and-pepper-haired legend in the DO, the Directorate of Operations, and beneficent mentor to Nate Nash. The urbane Forsyth had recruited prime ministers, Emirati princes, and, once, the pampered mistress of a Red Fleet admiral by taking her to an orphanage in Paris to watch children gambol in the playroom (Forsyth knew the admiral had refused to marry her and give her children). Recruitment was all about human needs, vulnerabilities, and motivations. Deeply affected by his solicitude, she started stealing Soviet naval secrets for Forsyth the next day.

  Then there was Marty Gable, career-long colleague of Forsyth. He was usually dressed in khaki bush shirt and hiking boots, and slouched on a couch. There wasn’t much Gable hadn’t seen. He had run assets in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Maghreb. He had recruited a penetration of the PKK terrorist group in Istanbul and rescued the blown agent by shooting a PKK enforcer between the eyes. To him, protecting his agents—namely DIVA—came first. Dominika took to calling him Bratok, big brother. He had taken the young Nate under his wing, lovingly kicking Nash’s ass to learn the Rules of the Game.

  The last of these new friends was Chief of Counterintelligence Simon Benford—podgy, angry, necktie perpetually askew. Most days the hair on one side of his head stuck out in a wing, exact cause unknown. Like Forsyth, Benford was an obelisk in the DO. In the last five years alone, the mercurial genius had led three separate investigations to unmask Russian-run moles inside CIA and the US government. Benford hated bureaucrats, careerists, mooncalves, mutton-heads, most of the special agents in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the entire Defense Intelligence Agency, and what he called the “homoerotic” Department of State. Due to the extreme sensitivity and restricted-handling protocol within the compartment, Benford became the senior Headquarters officer personally directing the DIVA case.

  Under their careful guidance, Dominika emptied the Helsinki rezidentura of all its secrets and, when she returned to Moscow, began reporting sensitive blue-stripe intelligence (designating the most sensitive and perishable secrets) from the vaults of Yasenevo, which soon made her CIA’s premier Russian source. For more than seven years, Dominika had stolen everything she could, and her CIA men kept her sane and alive, through heart-pounding personal meetings in Moscow alleyways, furtive rendezvous in foreign capitals, and abbreviated burst transmissions from her SRAC (short range agent communications) equipment. She laid open for CIA the Kremlin’s clandestine activities around the world.

  There was also the situation with her recruiting case officer, Nathaniel Nash. Dark hair spilling across his forehead, his exceptional falcon eyes on the street, the crimson aura around his shoulders, worked cumulatively on Dominika, already dazzled by CIA men and the wild sleigh ride of spying for them. What else happened between Nate and Dominika in Helsinki perhaps was inevitable. Thrown together under the unrelenting pressure of recruitment and espionage, Nate the agent handler and Dominika the clandestine asset fell in love. Their passion was unrelenting, their lovemaking volcanic, furtive, and limited to the rare occasions they were alone together. For Nate, an affair between a case officer and his asset was a career-ending infraction. For Dominika, sleeping with Nate the American would be fatal if discovered by the Center.

  Their liaison did not—could not—remain secret from CIA for long. Gable’s pheromonal instincts and Benford’s warlock prescience soon detected the forbidden affair. Nate was called on the carpet, but Benford chose for the moment not to fire him summarily from the service in the interests of intel production and keeping DIVA motivated. For her part, Dominika unconcernedly acknowledged the situation, accepted the risks, ignored Bratok Gable’s warnings, and reveled in her love for Nate. Nash had tried to stop the affair several times, but their passion was overwhelming. She refused to give him up, and he could not extinguish his crimson ardor.

  * * *

  * * *

  Brushing her heavy breasts across Nate’s face, Dominika got out of bed and padded over to the tiled corner of the tiny kitchen that was a makeshift shower, and doused herself with the handheld nozzle, wetting a substantial patch of the marble floor. Nate watched her wash her lithe body, white scars crisscrossing her ribs, ballet calves flexing as she rotated under the water. He got out of bed and joined her in the shower. Nate was muscular and thin with unruly black hair and brown eyes that missed little.

  “Can you see what I wrote?” asked Dominika, soaping his chest, tracing his own scars, the brown one across his belly, the angry red furrows on his arms. They were stitched mannequins, the two of them. Nate did not answer, but kissed her, holding her head in his hands, enveloping her in his red cloud.

&nbs
p; “Ti moy,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck. “You are mine.”

  “Does Vladimir Putin know?” he said.

  They sat on the tiny balcony of the cottage, the sun setting below the mountain behind the house. The rickety table had uneven legs and wobbled. The wicker chairs creaked loosely. They ate a peasant dinner with two oversized spoons, communally from a chipped terra-cotta bowl with painted blue dolphins around the rim. Nate had cooked the green beans slowly all day in olive oil, with onions, garlic, and crushed tomatoes. A separate dish was piled with olives, feta, and crusty country bread. They drank cold Retsina from a bottle floating in a tin washtub with the last of the ice slurry from yesterday. The shadows on the hillside were growing longer as they talked.

  “All I’m saying is that it’s dangerous for you to continue bouncing around the world personally recruiting North Koreans—or anyone for that matter—considering Putin could make you Director of SVR soon,” said Nate. They had spent the entire first day in the safe house discussing Dominika’s recruitment of Professor Ri, and the other intelligence Dominika had brought out of Moscow. Especially the most exciting news.

  Dominika had told Nate that as a result of President Putin’s continued sponsorship, he had hinted that he might soon promote her to the rank of general and, just possibly, give her the Directorship of the SVR, an astounding development that Nate immediately reported to Langley on his THRESHER encrypted satellite phone that was approved for limited use in NATO countries. Gobsmacked by the notion that his star agent might soon be running the SVR, Benford had spilled coffee on his tie, already liberally spotted with crab bisque and mayonnaise.